"Knight, Damon - Cabin Boy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Knight Damon)

"Nonsense," said the Mate uncertainly. "Nonsense," he repeated, in a stronger tone. "You must have been mistaken. Metal can't be alive."
"That's just what I thought, sir," said Tommy excitedly. "But there are live things in this metal, sir. I saw them. And the metal wasn't just floating along the way it's supposed to, sir. I saw it when the Captain brought it down, and ... But I'm afraid you'll think I'm lying, sir, if I tell you what it was doing."
"Well, what was it doing?"
"I swear I saw it, sir," Tommy went on. "The Captain will tell you the same thing, sir, if you ask him-he must have noticed."
"Sterilize it all, what was it doing?"
Tommy lowered his voice. "There was an ion trail shooting from it, sir. It was trying to get away!"
While the Mate was trying to absorb that, they reached the bottom of the corridor and entered the vast globular space of Assembly Five, lined with crewmen waiting to witness the punishment of Tommy Loy.
This was not going to be any fun at all, thought Tommy, but at least he had paid back the Third Mate in full measure. The Mate, for the moment, at any rate, was not taking any joy in his promised extra rations.

When it was over, Tommy huddled in a corner of the crew compartment where they had tossed him, bruised and smarting in every nerve, shaken by the beating he had undergone. The pain was still rolling through him in faint, uncontrollable waves, and he winced at each one, in spite of himself, as though it were the original blow.
In the back of his mind, the puzzle of the metal ship was still calling, but the other experience was too fresh, the remembered images too vivid.
The Captain had begun, as always, by reciting the Creed.
In the beginning was the Spore, and the Spore was alone.
(And the crew: Praised be the Spore!)
Next there was light, and the light was good. Yea, good for the Spore and the Spore's First Children.
(Praised be they!)
But the light grew evil in the days of the Spore's Second Children.
(Woe unto them!)
And the light cast them out. Yea, exiled were they, into the darkness and the Great Deep.
(Pity for the outcasts in the Great Deep!)
Tommy had mumbled his responses with the rest of them, thinking rebellious thoughts. There was nothing evil about light; they lived by it still. What must have happened-the Captain himself admitted as much when he taught history and natural science classes-was that the earliest ancestors of the race, spawned in the flaming heart of the Galaxy, had grown too efficient for their own good.
They had specialized, more and more, in extracting energy from starlight and the random metal and other elements they encountered in space; and at last they absorbed, willy-nilly, more than they could use. So they had moved, gradually and naturally, over many generations, out from that intensely radiating region into the "Great Deep"-the universe of thinly scattered stars. And the process had continued, inevitably; as the level of available energy fell, their absorption of it grew more and more efficient.
Now, not only could they never return to their birthplace, but they could not even approach a single sun as closely as some planets did. Therefore the planets, and the stars themselves, were objects of fear. That was natural and sensible. But why did they have to continue this silly ritual, invented by some half-evolved, superstitious ancestor, of "outcasts" and "evil"?
The Captain finished:
Save us from the Death that lies in the Great Deep...
(The creeping Death that lies in the Great Deep!)
And keep our minds pure...
(As pure as the light in the days of the Spore, blessed be He!)
And our course straight...
(As straight as the light, brothers!)
That we may meet our lost brothers again in the Day of Reuniting.
(Speed that day!)
Then the pause, the silence that grew until it was like the silence of space. At last the Captain spoke again, pronouncing judgment against Tommy, ending, "Let him be whipped!"
Tommy tensed himself, thickening his skin, drawing his body into the smallest possible compass. Two husky Ordinaries seized him and tossed him at a third. As Tommy floated across the room, the crewman pressed himself tightly against the wall, drawing power from it until he could contain no more. And as Tommy neared him, he discharged it in a crackling arc that filled Tommy's body with the pure essence of pain, and sent him hurtling across the chamber to the next shock, and the next, and the next.
Until the Captain had boomed "Enough!" and they had carried him out and left him here alone.

He heard the voices of crewmen as they drew their rations. One of them was grumbling about the taste, and another, sounding happily bloated, was telling him to shut up and eat, that metal was metal.
That would be the new metal, however much of it had been absorbed by now, mingled with the old in the reservoir. Tommy wondered briefly how much of it there was, and whether the alien ship-if it was a ship-could repair even a little damage to itself. But that assumed life in the metal, and in spite of what he had seen, Tommy couldn't believe in it. It seemed beyond question, though, that there were living things inside the metal, and when the metal was gone, how would they live?
Tommy imagined himself set adrift from the ship, alone in space, radiating more heat than his tiny volume could absorb. He shuddered.
He thought again of the problem that had obsessed him ever since he had seen the alien, five-pointed creatures in the metal ship. Intelligent life was supposed to be sacred. That was part of the Creed, and it was stated in a sloppy, poetic way like the rest of it, but it made a certain kind of sense. No crewman or captain had the right to destroy another for his benefit, because the same heredity was in them all. They were all potentially the same, none better than another.
And you ate metal, because metal was nonliving and certainly not intelligent. But if that stopped being true...
Tommy felt he was missing something. Then he had it: In the alien ship, trying to talk to the creatures that lived in metal, he had been scared almost scentless-but underneath the fright and the excitement, he had felt wonderful. It had been, he realized suddenly, like the mystic completion that was supposed to come when all the straight lines met, in the "Day of Reuniting" -- when all the far-flung ships, parted for all the billions of years of their flight, came together at last. It was talking to someone different from yourself.
He wanted to talk again to the aliens, teach them to form their uncouth sounds into words, learn from them ... Vague images swirled in his mind. They were products of an utterly different line of evolution. Who knew what they might be able to teach him?
And now the dilemma took shape. If his own ship absorbed the metal of theirs, they would die; therefore he would have to make the Captain let them go. But if he somehow managed to set them free, they would leave and he would never see them again.
A petty officer looked into the cubicle and said, "All right, Loy, out of it. You're on garbage detail. You eat after you work, if there's anything left. Lively, now!"
Tommy moved thoughtfully out into the corridor, his pain almost forgotten. The philosophical problems presented by the alien ship, too, having no apparent solution, were receding from his mind. A new thought was taking their place, one that made him glow inside with the pure rapture of the devoted practical jokester.
The whipping he was certainly going to get-and, so soon after the last offense, it would be a beauty-scarcely entered his mind.

IV