"Philip Jose Farmer - Tongues of the Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

"Broward," said Scone, "go sound out Nashdoi. Do it subtly."
"Wise as the serpent, subtle as the dove," said Broward. "Or is it the other way around?"
Scone lifted his eyebrows. "Never heard that before. From what book?"
Broward walked away without answering. It was significant that Scone did not know the source of the
quotation. The Old and New Testaments were allowed reading only for select scholars. Broward had read an illegal
copy, had put his freedom and life in jeopardy by reading it.
But that was not the point here. The thought that occurred to him was that, nationality and race aside, the
people on the Moon were a rather homogeneous group. Three-fourths of them were engineers or scientists of high
standing, therefore, had high I.Q.'s. They were descended from ancestors who had proved their toughness and good
genes by surviving through the last hundred years. They were all either agnostics or atheists or supposed to be so.
There would not be any religious differences to split them. They were all in superb health, otherwise they would not be
here. No diseases among them, not even the common cold. They would all make good breeding stock. Moreover, with
recent advances in genetic manipulation, defective genes could be eliminated electrochemically. Such a manipulation
had not been possible on Earth with its vast population where babies were being born faster than defective genes
could be wiped out. But here where there were so few...
Perhaps, it would be better to allow the Soviet system to exist for now. Later, use subtle means to bend it
towards the desired goal.
No! The system was based on too many falsities, among which the greatest was dialectical materialism. As
long as the corrupt base existed, the structure would be corrupt.
Broward sat down by Ingrid Nashdoi. She was a short, dark-skinned, small-boned, slightly overweight
woman. She had light brown, very large eyes, very long eyelashes, and straight dark brown hair, cut short. Her face
was a little too broad; her cheekbones were high. Although not pretty, she Was considered attractive because of her
vivacity, intelligence, and wit. Now, she stared at the floor, her face wooden.
Like a wooden Indian, thought Broward. Which was a natural comparison. She was half-Swedish,
half-Navaho, a type of mixture not rare in these days. The Russians, during the past fifty years, had removed entire
peoples from their native lands and placed them as colonists in barren countries for "redeemist" experiments. One of
the areas that had seen a wholesale mixing of such nationalities and races as Swedes, New Zealanders, Turks,
Peruvians, Thai, and so forth was the former Navaho-Hopi reservation of Arizona and New Mexico. Once a desert, it
was nowтАФrather, had beenтАФa garden of farms that owed its green state to reprocessing of the surfact into soil and a
plentiful flow of de-ionized ocean water.
Broward and Nashdoi had grown up in the same neighborhood and attended the same secondary and primary
schools.
Then, they had gone their own ways, to opposite ends of Earth. Years later, they had met again, on the
Moon. Broward had sharpened his rusty knowledge of Navaho speech by practicing it with her and her husband
whenever he got a chance.
"I'm sorry about Jim," he said. "But we don't have time to grieve now. Later, perhaps."
She did not look at him but replied in a low halting voice. "He may have been dead before the war started. I
never even got to say goodbye to him. You know what that means. What it probably did mean."
"I don't think they got anything out of him. Otherwise, you and I would have been arrested, too."
He jerked his head towards Scone and said, "He doesn't know you're one of us. I want him to think you're a
candidate for the Nationalists. After this struggle with the Russ is over, we may need someone who can report on him.
Think you can do it?"
She nodded her head, and Broward returned to Scone. "She hates the Russians," he said. "You know they
took her husband away. She doesn't know why. But she hates Ivan's guts."
"Good. Ah, here we go."
After the destroyer had berthed at Clavius, and the three entered the base, events went swiftly if not
smoothly. Scone talked to the entire personnel over the IP, told them what had happened. Then he went to his office
and issued orders to have the arsenal cleaned out of all portable weapons. These were transferred to the four
destroyers the Russians had assigned to Clavius as a token force.
Broward then called in his four Athenians and Scone, his five Nationalists. The situation was explained to