"Blish, James - Surface Tension" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

out. It's got to be fresh water, where the competing creatures
are less formidable and there are more places to hide."
"We can't compete with a jellyfish?" la Ventura asked, swal-
lowing.
"No, Paul," Chatvieux said. "Not with one that dangerous.
The pantropes make adaptations, not gods. They take human
germ-cellsin this case, our own, since our bank was wiped
out in the crashand modify them genetically toward those
of creatures who can live in any reasonable environment. The
result will be manlike, and intelligent. It usually shows the
donors' personality patterns, too, since the modifications are
usually made mostly in the morphology, not so much in the
mind, of the resulting individual.
"But we can't transmit memory. The adapted man is worse
than a child in the new environment. He has no history, no
techniques, no precedents, not even a language. In the usual
colonization project, like the Tellura affair, the seeding teams
more or less take him through elementary school before they
leave the planet to him, but we won't survive long enough to
give such instruction. We'll have to design our colonists with
plenty of built-in protections and locate them in the most fa-
vorable environment possible, so that at least some of them
will survive learning by experience alone."
The pilot thought about it, but nothing occurred to him
which did not make the disaster seem realer and more inti-
mate with each passing second. Joan Heath moved slightly
closer to him. "One of the new creatures can have my per-
sonality pattern, but it won't be able to remember being me.
Is that right?"
"That's right. In the present situation we'll probably make
our colonists haploid, so that some of them, perhaps many,
will have a heredity traceable to you alone. There may be
just the faintest of residuums of identitypantropy's given
us some data to support the old Jungian notion of ancestral
memory. But we're all going to die on Hydrot, Paul, as self-
conscious persons. There's no avoiding that. Somewhere we'll
leave behind people who behave as we would, think and feel
as we would, but who won't remember la Ventura, or Dr.
Chatvieux, or Joan Heathor the Earth."
The pilot said nothing more. There was a gray taste in his
mouth.
"Saltonstall, what would you recommend as a form?"
The pantropist pulled reflectively at his nose. "Webbed ex-
tremities, of course, with thumbs and big toes heavy and
thorn-like for defense until the creature has had a chance
to learn. Smaller external ears, and the eardrum larger and
closer to the outer end of the ear-canal. We're going to have
to reorganize the water-conservation system, I think; the glo-
merular kidney is perfectly suitable for living in fresh water,
but the business of living immersed, inside and out, for a