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

a dome, either.
"Besides, they had had form trouble in their society from
their earliest days. For centuries they were absurdly touchy
over minute differences in coloring and shape, and even in
thinidng. They had regime after regime that tried to impose its
own concept of the standard citizen on everybody, and en-
slaved those who didn't fit the specs."
Abruptly, Hoqqueah's 'chatter began to make Gorbel un-
comfortable. It was becoming easier and easier to sympathize
with Averdor's determination to ignore the Adapted Man's
existence entirely.
"It was only after they'd painfully taught themselves that
such differences really don't matter that they could go on to
pantropy," Hoqqueah said. "It was the logical conclusion. Of
course, a certain continuity of form had to be maintained,
and has been maintained to this day. You cannot totally
change the form without totally changing the thought proc-
esses. If you give a man the form of a cockroach, as one an-
cient writer foresaw, he will wind up thinking hie a cock-
roach, not like a human being. We recognized that. On worlds
where only extreme modifications of the human form would
make it suitablefor instance, a planet of the gas giant type
no seeding is attempted. The Council maintains that such
worlds are the potential property of other races than the
human, races whose psychotypes would not have to undergo
radical change in order to survive there."
Dimly, Capt. Gorbel saw where Hoqqueah was leading him,
and he did not like what he saw. The seal-man, in his own
maddeningly indirect way, was arguing his right to be con-
sidered an equal in fact as well as in law. He was arguing it,
however, in a universe of discourse totally unfamiliar to Capt.
Gorbel, with facts whose validity he alone knew and whose
relevance he alone could judge. He was, in short, loading the
dice, and the last residues of Corbel's tolerance were evapo-
rating rapidly.
"Of course there was resistance back there at the begin-
ning," Hoqqueah said. "The kind of mind that had only re-
cently been persuaded that colored men are human beings was
quick to take the attitude that an Adapted Manany Adapted
Manwas the social inferior of the 'primary' or basic human
type, the type that lived on Earth. But it was also a very old
idea on the Earth that basic humanity inheres in the mind,
not in the form.
"You see. Captain, all this might still have been prevented,
had it been possible to maintain the attitude that changing
the form even in part makes a man less of a man than he was
in the 'primary' state. But the day has ,come when that at-
titude is no longer tenablea day that is the greatest of all
inoral watersheds for our race, the day that is to unite all our
divergent currents of attitudes toward each other into one