"Thomas Easton - Organic Future 04 - Seeds of Destiny" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

Orbitals and took over the whole system, not just Earth and the Moon."
"There might be a few left."
"Enough of them?" Hrecker asked. His tone was insistent. "Every time something goes wrong, every
blowout, every equipment failure, every... Enough to take all the blame?"
"They're useful that way, aren't they?"
"There can't possibly be a resistance movement!"
Saucier nodded. "Don't say that outside the lab."
"Do you think I'm suicidal?"
"You had that flower."
He fell silent. So he had. He supposed he wouldn't have if he hadn't felt able to trust the lab. He would
have found some way to refuse the cursed gift, or to get rid of it. He might even have cried out for
Security to seize the treasonous old woman.
He had been quite astoundingly foolish to do what he had done. He loved the lab for its tolerance of
difference, for its atmosphere of intellectual independence, for its old-fashioned free speech. But talk was
one thing. Doing was quite another.
"What did you want me to see?"
The weathergirl was done. The soccer report from Earth was nearly over.
"There it is." Saucier didn't really need to point as the screen filled with a Q-ship, all swollen nose and
slender shaft jutting from a bundle of cylindrical reaction-mass tanks. "The Explorer."
The newscaster, his voice urgent with professional emotion, was saying:
"...back from Tau Ceti, where they found a world with intelligent life. It may be the Gypsies'
First-Stop, according to Commander Dengh."
Pictures flashed across the screen. Humanoid aliens, large-skulled, round-bellied, and blunt-muzzled,
standing erect but fur-covered, some with tails, some without. Cities and fields and roads, ships and
trucks, a high, high tower centered in a nearly circular valley, a handful of artificial satellites. A world with
two large continents separated by no more ocean than lay between Europe and Africa, each one
wreathed in arcs of islands.
"How long have they been back?" asked Hrecker.
 "A month. They've kept it quiet."
"Why? What's the secret?"
"The Gypsies. The best our people could tell, the age of the buildings, the size of the road network, the
amount of environmental damage, all indicate a very young civilization. And that tower. The locals aren't
quite advanced enough to build it. And they speak a kind of English. Our biologists think the Gypsies
must have gengineered them from animals."
"I hope they spent the month arguing over what to do," said Hrecker.
Saucier nodded. "We're not our ancestors. But we do need to do something. If we don't, the
conservatives will gain power and we may turn as destructive as ever. Or the underground, if there really
is one, will sense weakness."
"Then-- "
"That's what that meeting was about." When Hrecker looked puzzled, he added, "Just before you got
here. That's why I came in here in the first place, things to tell you, and then the rest. They're moving us."
"Why?"
"The Explorer's our only starship, and it's small. We need more and bigger if we're to send a force to
Tau Ceti." He shook his head. "It will study the place in detail. It will see whether the Gypsies really did
do anything. And then it will do whatever it thinks appropriate."
Hrecker closed his eyes and shuddered. "So they want more ships."
"The government is drafting every Q-drive designer and engineer there is."
"Whether they're in the spaceship business or not."
"We used to be. We gave them the tunnel drive."
"But we're not anymore. We're scientists, not engineers, and we've moved on."