"Blish, James - Seeding Program" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

after all?"
"No," Sweeney said. Rullman surely must know that; radio
talk between Earth and Moon must be detectable at least oc-
casionally out here. "There were still some intercom lines left
through to there; my mother used to spend a lot of time lis-
tening in on what was going on. So did I, after I was old
enough to understand it. That was how we found out that the
Ganymedian colony hadn't been bombed out, either."
"But where did you get your power?"
"Most of it from our own strontium"" cell. Everything was
shielded so the cops couldn't detect any 'stray fields. When the
cell finally began to give out, we had to tap Port's main ac-
cumulator line -just for a little bit at first, but the drain kept
going up." He shrugged. "Sooner or later they were bound to
spot it and did."
Rullman was momentarily silent, and Sweeney knew that
he was doing the pertinent arithmetic in his head, comparing
the 20-year half-life of strontium"" with Sweeney's and the
Adapted Men's chronology. The figures would jibe, of course.
The Port cops' briefing had been thorough about little details
like that.
"It's still quite astounding, having to rethink this whole
episode after so many years," Rullman said. "With all due re-
spect, Mr. Sweeney, it's hard to imagine Shirley Leverault
going through such an ordeal and all alone, too, except for
a child she could never even touch, a child as difficult and
technical to tend as an atomic pile. I remember her as a frail,
low-spirited girl, trailing along after us listlessly because Rob-
ert was in the project." He frowned reminiscently. "She used
to say. It's his job.' She never thought of it as anything more
than that."
"/was her job," Sweeney said evenly. The Port cops had
tried to train him to speak bitterly when he mentioned his
mother, but he had never been able to capture the emotion
that they wanted him to imitate. He had found, however, that
if he rapped out the syllables almost without inflection, they
were satisfied with the effect. "You misjudged 'her. Dr. Rull-
manor else she changed after Dad was killed. She had guts
enough for ten. And she got paid for it in the end. In the only
coin the Port cops know how to pay."
"I'm sorry," Rullman said gently. "But at least you got
away. I'm sure that's as she would have wanted it. Where did
the ship you spoke of come from?"
"Why, we always had it. It belonged to Dad, I suppose. It
was stored in a natural chimney near our dome. When the
cops broke into the monitoring room, I went out the other
side of the dome, while they were busy with mother, and
beat it. There wasn't anything I could have done"
"Of course, of course," Rullman said, his voice low and
quiet. "You wouldn't have lasted a second in their air. You