"Damon Knight - Four in one (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Knight Damon)

There were no other rules; and yet it had taken the Japanese almost a thousand years to work up
to that thirty-by-thirty board, adding perhaps one rank and file per century. A hundred years was
not too long to explore all the possibilities of that additional rank and file.
At the time George Meister fell into the gelatinous green-and-brown monster. toward the end of
the twenty third century A.D., a kind of _go_ was being played in a three-dimensional field which
contained more than ten billion positions. The galaxy was the board, the positions were star
systems, men were the counters. The loser's penalty was annihilation.
The galaxy was in the process of being colonized by two opposing federations, In the early
stages of this conflict, planets had been raided, bombs dropped, and a few battles had even been
fought by fleets of spaceships. Later that haphazard sort of warfare became impossible. Robot
fighters, carrying enough armament to blow each other into dust, were produced in trillions. In
the space around the outer stars of a cluster belonging to one side or the other, they swarmed
like minnows.
Within such a screen, planets were utterly safe from attack and from any interference with their
commerce ... unless the enemy succeeded in colonizing enough of the circumambient star systems to
set up and maintain a second screen outside the first. It was _go_, played for desperate stakes
and under impossible conditions.
Everyone was in a hurry; everyone's ancestors for seven generations had been in a hurry. You got
your education in a speeded-up, capsulized form. You mated early and bred frantically. And if you
were assigned to an advance ecological team, as George was, you had to work without any decent
preparation.
The sensible, the obvious thing to do in opening up a new planet with unknown life forms would
have been to begin with at least ten years of immunological study conducted from the inside of a
sealed station. After the worst bacteria and viruses had been licked, you might proceed to a
little cautious field work and exploration. Finally--total elapsed time fifty years, say--the
colonists would be shipped in.
There simply wasn't that much time.
Five hours after the landing, Meister's team had unloaded fabricators and set up barracks
enough to house its two thousand, six hundred and twenty-eight members. An hour after that,


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Meister. Gumbs, Bellis and McCarty started out across the level cinder and ash left by the
transport's tail jets to the nearest living vegetation, six hundred meters away. They were to
trace a spiral path outward from the camp site to a distance of a thousand meters, and then return
with their specimens--providing nothing too large and hungry to be stopped by a machine rifle had
previously eaten them.
Meister, the biologist, was hung with collecting boxes to the point that his slender torso was
totally invisible. Major Gumbs had a survival kit, binoculars and a machine rifle. Vivian Bellis,
who knew exactly as much mineralogy as had been contained in the three-month course prescribed for
her rating, and no more, carried a light rifle, a hammer and a specimen sack. Miss McCarty--no one
knew her first name--had no scientific function. She was the group's Loyalty Monitor. She wore two
squat pistols and a bandolier bristling with cartridges. Her only job was to blow the cranium off
any team member caught using an unauthorized communicator, or in any other way behaving oddly.
All of them were heavily gloved and booted, and their heads were covered by globular helmets,
sealed to their tunic collars. They breathed through filtered respirators, so finely meshed that--
in theory--nothing larger than an oxygen molecule could get through.
On their second circuit of the camp, they had struck a low ridge and a series of short, steep