"EB - Edward L. Ferman - The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction 23rd EditionUC - SS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine)

"I've never eaten human flesh," Lang went on, "but I think I know what it must taste like. Those vines to your right; we strip off the outer part and eat the meat underneath. It tastes good. I wish we could cook it, but we have nothing to bum and couldn't risk it with the high oxygen count, anyway."
Singh and everyone else was silent for a while. He found he realty was beginning to believe in the Martians. The theory seemed to cover a lot of otherwise inexplicable facts.
Mary Lang sighed, slapped her thighs, and stood up. Like all the others, she was nude and seemed totally at home with it None of them had worn anything but a Martian pressure suit for eight years. She ran her hand lovingly over the gossamer wall, the wall that had provided her and her fellow colonists and their children protection from the cold and the thin air for so long. He was struck by her easy familiarity with what seemed to him outlandish surroundings. She looked at home. He couldn't imagine her anywhere else.
He looked at the children. One wide-eyed little girl of eight years was kneeling at his feet. As his eyes fell on her, she smiled tentatively and took his hand.
"Did you bring any bubblegum?" the girl asked.
He smiled at her. "No, honey, but maybe there's some hi the ship." She seemed satisfied. She would wait to experience the wonders of Earthly science.
"We were provided for," Mary Lang said quietly. "They knew we were coming and they altered their plans to fit us in." She looked back to Singh. "It would have happened even without the blowout and the burials. The same sort of thing was happening around the Podkayne, too, triggered by our waste; urine and feces and such. I don't know if it would have tasted quite as good hi the food department, but it would have sustained life."
Singh stood up. He was moved, but did not trust himself to show ft adequately. So he sounded rather abrupt, though polite.
"I suppose you'll be anxious to go to the ship," he said. "You're going to be a tremendous help. You know so much of what we were sent here to find out. And you'll be quite famous when you get back to Earth. Your back pay should add up to quite a sum."
There was a silence, then it was ripped apart by Lang*s huge
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laugh. She was joined by the others, and the children, who didn't know what they were laughing about but enjoyed the break in the tension.
"Sorry, Captain. That was rude. But we're not going back."
Singh looked at each of the adults and saw no trace of doubt. And he was mildly surprised to find that the statement did not startle him.
"I won't take that as your final decision," he said. "As you know, we'll be here six months. If at the end of that time any of you want to go, you're still citizens of Earth."
"We are? You'll have to brief us on the political situation back there. We were United States citizens when we left. But it doesn't matter. You won't get any takers, though we appreciate the fact that you came. It's nice to know we weren't forgotten." She said it with total assurance, and the others were nodding. Singh was uncomfortably aware that the idea of a rescue mission had died out only a few years after the initial tragedy. He and his ship were here now only to explore.
Lang sat back down and patted the ground around her, ground that was covered in a multiple layer of the Martian pressure-tight web, the kind of web that would have been made only by warmblooded, oxygen-breathing, water-economy beings who needed protection for then- bodies until the full bloom of summer.
"We like it here. It's a good place to raise a family, not like Earth the last time I was there. And it couldn't be much better now, right after another war. And we can't leave, even if we wanted to." She flashed him a dazzling smile and patted the ground again.
"The Martians should be showing up any time now. And we aim to thank them."
From Competition 18: SF titles in which two or more words are transposed
CAMPBELL'S There Goes Who? STURGEON'S Well Sturgeon Is Alive and. HEINLEIN'S Rolling the Stones ASIMOV'S Asimov the Early MATHESON's Born of Man, Woman and
CLAUSE'S Tales White From the Hart BURROUGH'S Ant Tarzan and the Men HENDERSON'S The Different People: No Flesh LUNDWALL'S What About Science: It's All Fiction
ЧMarc Russell
ЧWes and Lynn Pederson
DICK'S The High In the Castle, Man AMIS' Hell of New Maps MOORCOCK'S Ruins in the Breakfast SILVERBERG'S Inside Dying
The Sturgeon of Theodore Best ASIMOV'S The Trilogy Foundation ANDERSON'S Me Call Joe
ЧHarvey Abramson
ЧAl Sarrantonio
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CAPER'S URR
RUSS's // Changed? When?
MOORE'S Eye the Girl With Rapid Movements
DICK'S We Can Wholesale It For You, Remember? SILVERBERG'S Dead With The Born
ЧJeremy Hole
ЧBarry N. Malzberg
HERBERT'S The Frank Worlds of Herbert
ELLISON'S Gentleman and Other Junkie Stories of the Hung-up Generation
ЧDavid Labor
In answer to all the requests for more positive, upbeat sf with some good old-fashioned Heros, we offer with some hesitation this tale of first contact between lowly Human and mighty Sreen.
Upstart
by STEVEN UTLEY
"You must obey the edict of the Sreen," the Intermediaries have told us repeatedly, "there is no appeal," but the captain won't hear of it, not for a moment. He draws himself up to his full height of two meters and looms threateningly over the four or five Intermediaries, who are, after all, small and not particularly substantial-looking beings, mere wisps of translucent flesh through which their bluish skeletal structures and pulsing organs can be seen.
"You take us in to talk to the Sreen," the captain tells them, "you take us in right now, do you hear me?" His voice is like a sword coming out of its scabbard, an angry, menacing, deadly metal-on-metal rasp. "You take us to these God-damned Sreen of yours and let us talk to them."
The Intermediaries shrink before him, fluttering their pallid appendages in obvious dismay, and bleat in unison, "No, no, what you request is impossible. The decision of the Sreen is final, and, anyway, they're very busy right now, they can't be bothered."
The captain wheels savagely, face mottled, teeth bared, arms windmilling with rage. I have never seen him this furious before, and it frightens me. Not that I cannot appreciate and even share his anger toward the Sreen, of course. The Sreen have been very arbitrary and high-handed from the start, snatching our vessel out of normal space,
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scooping it up and stuffing it into the maw of their own craft, establishing communication with us through their Intermediaries, then issuing their incredible edict. They do not appear to care that they have interfered with Humankind's grandest endeavor. Our vessel is Terra's first bona fide starship, in which the captain and I were to have accelerated through normal space to light-velocity, activated the tardyon-tachyon conversion system and popped back into normal space in the neighborhood of Alpha Centauri. I can understand how the captain feels.
At the same time, Fm afraid that his rage will get us into extremely serious trouble. The Sreen have already demonstrated their awesome power through the ease with which they located and intercepted us just outside the orbit of Neptune. Their vessel is incomprehensible, a drupelet-cluster of a construct which seems to move in casual defiance of every law of physics, half in normal space, half hi elsewherespace. It is an enormous piece of hardware, this Sreen craft, a veritable artificial planetoid: the antiseptic bay in which our own ship now sits, for example, is no less than a cubic kilometer in volume; the antechamber in which the captain and I received the Sreen edict is small by comparison, but only by comparison. Before us is a great door of dully gleaming gray metal, five or six meters high, approximately four wide. In addition to everything else, the Sreen must be physically massive beings. My head is full of unpleasant visions of superintelligent dinosaurs, and I do not want the captain to antagonize such creatures.