"Lester Del Rey - Idealist UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Del Rey Lester)around the huge circle of the Station. It wasn't repeated, and he stopped to yell from time to time, and to listen. His heart was pounding again, and a sudden fear washed through him as he remembered the man with the machine gun.
Then he stumbled into the man-but he was a corpse, like the others. The machine gun was still clutched tightly, but a section of shelving had cut him half in two, and he hung there, an expression of utter bewilderment on his face. Fen-ton must have missed him the first time, or paid no attention to one body among the rest; the gunman had been before the first corpse with the bullet wound. Probably he'd been on his way to kill more when the shock hit him. Fenton recoiled mentally from the picture of a man who could proceed on a mission of murder deliberately. But then the sound of a human voice reached him faintly, and he dashed on. It was coming from the tube that led to the center of the Station, a weak moaning. Now it was less human, as if an animal had been wounded and left to die there. He slid down the tube. The door to the room in which he had come to was still open, but there was another one beside it. He ripped it open, and one beyond that. There were only four rooms here in the tiny infirmary, and the last one had to be right. As if to prove it, another moan came. He opened the door cautiously this time, but there was nothing to fear. In a cocoon like the one in which he had awakened, and with a similar drug tube in the arm, a girl's body lay. It was contorted in agony now, and the tied-down hands were threshing slightly. The face was twisted, and a steady moan came from the opened mouth. "Martha!" Fenton leaped forward, and then stopped. It had been Martha Graves, once. But now the body there was only human by definition. Too much work in the radiation laboratory had caught up with her, starting a vicious and almost impossibly rapid brain tumor. The doctor had been forced to operate here, and most of the brain that had once held the genuine genius of the physicist had gone with the tumor, leaving only the animal functions behind. She had been supposed to leave on the next ship up. Fenton couldn't understand the pain, though. They had meant to take her off the drugs the same day he had been hurt. Then a twinge from his own stomach supplied the an- swer. He dashed out toward the nearest galley, grabbing whatever unspoiled food was available and a plastic bulb of water. He swallowed rapidly on his way back. The mouth of the unhappy creature drooled at the smell of the food. She sucked down the water, making a mess of it, and began swallowing some of the food. Her moans cut off, and a few minutes later she was asleep. He pulled the needle out of her arm quietly, and stood debating with himself. Then he grimaced. The eighteen-year-old section of his mind had been uppermost, obviously. Nothing he could do now would worry what had been Martha Graves. He located a bottle of alcohol in the pharmacy, poured it into a bulb, and took it back to the gravity-free center, where he sponged her off gently. She awoke when he pulled her from the cocoon, and again when he put her back, but she fell asleep almost at once in both cases. Then he went out and was sick. The idea had finally hit him. He was alone here with something that was still female, but no longer human. And as far as he knew, there might be no other human beings hi the whole universe. The supply ships should have been here before the length of time that had obviously passed. He was surprised at that, amazed at the fact that his brain had speculated on the end of the Earth, and, had almost accepted it, below the level of his consciousness, while he had tended to the needs, of the girl. With a leap, he spun to the nearest hatch leading to the outer edge of the Station. He'd never even thought to investigate it, before. Then he saw the red signal over the lock, indicating that the half of the doughnut-tube farthest from the center was without air. Whatever had hit the Station must have opened the outer edge to space, and the inner section had been saved only by the automatic seals that had immediately shut down. He found a space-suit and climbed into it, checking its air supply. Then he set the hatch to manual, and crawled through. It was worse than it had been below. Apparently the whole great outer seam of the Station had sprung open. The corpses here were bloated things, puffed out by the air pressure within them as they died. But after the living death below, this didn't hit him as it might have done before. He made his way through the shambles that had been man's finest achievement. His half-memory of bombs was nagging at him, together with the things his brain had guessed at. He located the big bomb bay, which was never to have been used, but to have prevented war by its mere existence. Here, five hundred H-bombs rested, their tubes ready to drive them on controlled courses to Earth. And here, probably, bad been the place where the ones he was ferrying from the supply ship had been brought. How many? He had no idea. But now there were only a score of them, while the hand of one of the corpses was still tightly locked on the release lever of one of those. Below him, the giant ball that was Earth lay cradled in space, blue-green on the lighted half towards which the Station was moving. He wondered whether the exact two-hour rotation of the Station had been disturbed. Probably not enough to show. And even completely wrecked, it could still sail on its orbit here forever, with nothing to slow it, and no way to fall at its present speed. Then his eyes focused en a tiny spot of light on the dark side of the Earth-tiny here, but still larger and brighter than anything he could remember. It was as if the whole of a city had burst into flames. He stood there, unwilling to believe what alone could explain it all. Somehow, the impossible had happened. War that had threatened so long had finally broken out. Men had turned against men-when all of space lay waiting for their conquest! Nation with atomic bombs had been pitted against nation with bacteriological weapons. The threat of the bombs from the Station had become reality, and Earth had somehow reached up a long finger of wrath to strike back. There had even been treason here. The man with the machine gun-^Peter Olin, master mechanic, ten years with the Station, Fenton suddenly remembered-had betrayed them. It must have been in his mind for years, since there was no other reason for a smuggled gun here. He'd gotten control over the officers so quickly that no word had spread, and then had begun working backwards, killing as he went, not caring about the noise here where so many sounds passed down the echoing metal walls. And the great guided missile-perhaps from his own nation-had struck him down along with those he had wanted to betray. Only the two in the infirmary had been spared. He was sobbing wildly, and his cries rang in his ears when he found himself back in the control room. The incipient insanity in his own voice snapped him back, slowly this time, through his childhood horror of violence, his bravado as a youth setting out to help save the world, and finally the present where his whole hope and faith had been tied up in this great hulk of metal around him. It had failed. He faced it now-and he knew that even without all its slowly returning memories, his mind was back to the thirty-five-year level. There were twisted, bitter thoughts still, but he faced the fact which he couldn't have accepted once. The Station had failed, and his fellow men had blown out the spark of divinity in them and gone back to the jungles, with all the power of the science that could have made them star-mea. He was still crying, and he made no effort to stop it. But he was in control of himself. Slowly, with a sick fear of what he must see, he moved to the screen that was set to show the scene on Earth toward which the telescope pointed. He flipped it on, adjusting the levers that controlled the instrument by a process of trial and error. For a moment he stopped then, and looked up toward the Moon that rode in space so far above him. Men had been about to reach that. He'd even hoped that he might go along. Now it was lost. Then he looked down, seeing the vision of what had been a city through the thin veil of clouds. Atmospheric disturbance blurred some of the outlines, but enough showed through. It was a slag heap, burned out of all resemblance to a scene of Earth. And for fifty miles beyond it, desolation spread out-a land where no life could live. He shifted the telescope from time to time as the Station moved across the Earth, jumping from city to city, and finally seeking out the lesser ones. Some of those had obviously been hit only by the old-style A-bombs-but damage was complete enough. He dropped the controls and let the scene below slide by as the Station cruised on. For a few minutes, a welcome numbness hit him. Then he stood up slowly. There would be poison in the dispensary. He reached for the screen switch, and froze. In the scene, dots moved slowly. He dropped back to the webbing seat, staring down, trying to increase the magnification. The Station was over Africa now-and that meant that he was watching some of the larger animals, probably. But. .. Something else moved, a mere dot in the screen, but still having a vague shape. Its speed told the real story though. It was an airplane. And now that he looked closer, he saw that the dots below were traveling too straight for beasts. They must be cars on a road! Life still went on. Fenton shook himself, and his trembling fingers reached for the switch of the ultra-frequency radio. He knew too little about it to do much more than turn it on and move the tuning dial across the band. For a minute there was silence. Then a faint sputter sounded, and he detected Morse code. He tuned in more carefully, until it was faint but clear, and reached for the microphone. But the transmitter refused to go on, and the signal was in a language which he couldn't understand. Men, he thought for the thousandth time, should have a common speech to reflect their common origin. But it really didn't matter. He yanked open the housing of the transmitter, and jiggled with the tubes inside, knowing it was foolish, but ia an automatic hope. One of the tubes was dark. He fumbled for the locker under the table, and began pawing through spare parts, hoping that the shock of the H-bomb that had probably exploded outside the Station had left one good tube of that type. He was hi luck. The meter on the transmitter flashed on as soon as he made the change. But now the Morse had vanished, since the Station had probably gone over the horizon. Even that didn't matter. Where some survived, there would be others. The cities and the sciences would be gone, but the race would continue. And down there now, he'd be needed, as every man who had any of the old skills would be needed. Maybe men with some engineering training couldn't build more space-ships this generation. But they could help rebuild a world that might again look to the stars. And after the bitter lesson of this ^nearly fatal holocaust, there would surely be no more wars to hold them back. It was sheer reaction to his depression, Fenton knew. But it made sense, too. And he could return. There was the little emergency ship, with fuel enough to reach Earth easily. He could stock it with all the supplies available-there was no telling what might be short on Earth now. The oxygen tanks were gone with the wreckage of the outer half. But he could put in plants from the hydroponic section; hi some ways, they'd be even better. With them to replace the oxygen in the air, there was no theoretical limit to how long a man could live in the closed world of a space-ship. He got up from the radio desk and went out and toward the loading tube, where the little ship lay waiting. Some measure of reality returned to cancel his false optimism, while he loaded the ship to the limit. The fact that men still lived didn't make their acts in this final war any less horrible, nor did it bring the conquest of space any nearer. Little by little, his sickness and his horror returned. But there was at least some hope, and without life there was none. Even the dumbest animals learned in time; and this time, man had been given a lesson that could never be overlooked, while the great ruins of his cities still stood there to remind him. It would be a bitter and a horrible life in such a world. But someday, in the far future, Fenton's descendants would stand on the Lunar Apennines and look up at Earth with pride oa their faces. Fenton finished his work and came back up through the ruined Station. Minute by minute the air seemed to be growing more foul with the smell of death. He came to the corpse of the traitor, Peter Olin, and his eyes dropped. Sometime, he'd have to face the fact that his race had produced men such as that; but not now-not now... |
|
|