"Blish, James - Watershed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

the place, but the specs don't make it sound like an optimum
world."
"To be sure," Hoqqueah said, though as usual Corbel didn't
know which part of his own comment Hoqqueah was agreeing
to. "There's no survival value in pinning one's race forever to
one set of specs. It's only sensible to go on evolving with the
universe, so as to stay independent of such things as the aging
of worlds, or the explosions of their stars. And look at the
results! Man exists now in so many forms that there's always
a refuge somewhere for any threatened people. That's a great
achievementcompared to it, what price the old arguments
about sovereignty of form?"
"What, indeed?" Corbel said, but inside his skull his other
. self was saying: Ah-ha, he smells the hostility after all. Once
an Adapted Man, always an Adapted Manand always
fighting for equality with the basic human form. But it's no
good, you seal-snouted bureaucrat. You can argue for the
isi
rest of your life, but your whiskers will always wiggle when
you talk.
And obviously you'll never stop talking.
"And as a military man yourself, you'd be the first to ap-
preciate the military advantages, Captain,". Hoqqueah
added earnestly. "Using pantropy, man has seized thousands
of worlds that would have been inacccessible to him otherwise.
It's enormously increased our chances to become masters of
the galaxy, to take most of it under occupation without steal-
ing anyone else's planet in the process. An occupation without
dispossessionlet alone without bloodshed. Yet if some
race other than man should develop imperial ambitions, and
try to annex our planets, it will find itself enormously out-
numbered."
"That's true," Capt. Gorbel said, interested in spite of him-
self. "It's probably just as well that we worked fast, way back
there in the beginning. Before somebody else thought up the
method, I mean. But, how come it was us? Seems to me that
the first race to invent it should've been a race that already
had itif you follow me."
"Not quite. Captain. If you will give me an example1"
"Well, we scouted a system once where there was a race
that occupied two different planets, not both at the same time,
but back and forth," Gorbel said. "They had a lifecycie that
had three different forms. In the first form they'd winter over
on the outermost of .the two worlds. Then they'd change to
another form that could cross space, mother-naked, without
ships, and spend the rest of the year on the inner planet in
the third form. Then they'd change back into the second form
and cross back to the colder planet.
"It's a hard thing to describe. But the point is, this wasn't
anything they'd worked out; it was natural to them. They'd