"C M Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl - Wolfbane UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

mg!1
"But they're going to kill us!"
"Then why aren't you composing your death poem?"
Glenn Tropile took a deep breath. Something was biting him.
It was bad enough that he was about to die, bad enough that he had done nothing worth dying for. But what was gnawing at him now had nothing to do with dying.
The percentages were going the wrong way. This pale Citizen was getting an edge on him.
An engorged gland in Tropile's adrenals-it was only a pinhead in Citizen Boyne's-trickled subtle hormones into his bloodstream. He could die, yes-that was a skill everyone had to acquire, sooner or later. But while he was alive, he could not stand to be bested in an encounter, an argument, a relationship. It was not in Glenn Tropile's makeup to allow anyone to defeat him, in anything, without a fight. Wolf? Call him Wolf. Call him Operator, or Percentage Player; call him Sharp Article; call him Gamesman.
If there was an advantage to be derived, he would derive it. It was the way he was put together.
He said, stalling for time to scheme, "You're right. Stupid of me, I must have lost my head!"
He thought. Some men think by poking problems apart, some think by laying facts side-by-side to compare. Tropile's thinking was neither of these, but a species of judo. He
conceded to his opponent such things as Strength, Armor, Resource. He didn't need these things for himself; to every contest the opponent brought enough of them to supply two. It was Tropile's habit (and definitely a Wolfish one, he had to admit) to use the opponent's strength against him, to break the opponent against his own steel walls.
He thought.
The first thing, he thought, was to make up his mind: He was Wolf. Then let him be Wolf-he wouldn't stay around for the spinal tap, he would go from there. But how?
The second thing was to make a plan. There were obstacles. Citizen Boyne was one of the obstacles. Harmane, the Keeper of the House of the Five Regulations, was another.
Where was the pole which would permit him to vault over these hurdles? There was, he thought, always his wife, Gala. He owned her; she would do what he wished-provided he made her want to do it.
Yes, Gala. He walked to the door and shouted to Citizen Harmane: "Keeper! Keeper, I must see my wife. Have her brought to me!"
It was impossible for the Keeper to refuse; he didn't. He called gently, "I will invite the Citizeness," and toddled away.
The third thing was time.
Tropile turned to Citizen Boyne. "Citizen," he said persuasively, "since your death poem is ready and mine is not, will you be gracious enough to go first when they-when they come?"
Citizen Boyne looked temperately at his cellmate and made the Quirked Smile.
"You see?" he said. "Wolf." And that was true; but what was also true was that he couldn't refuse.
_______4_______
Half a world away, the midnight-blue Pyramid sat on its planed-off peak as it had sat since the days when Earth had a real Sun of its own.
It was of no importance to the Pyramid that Glenn Tropile was about to receive a slim catheter into his spine, to drain his sap and his life. It didn't matter to the Pyramid that the spinal fluid would then be swallowed by his fellows, or that the pretext for the execution was an act which human history used not to consider a capital crime. Ritual sacrifice in whatever guise made no difference to the Pyramid. The Pyramid saw them come and the Pyramid saw them go-if the Pyramid could be said to "see". One human being more or less, what matter? Who bothers to take a census of the cells in a hangnail?
And yet, the Pyramid did have a kind of
interest in Glenn Tropile, and in the human race of which he was a part.
Nobody knew much about the Pyramid, but everybody knew that much. They wanted something-else why would they have bothered to steal the Earth?
And that they had definitely done.
The year was 2027 A.D., a true date to live in infamy. There were other years that human beings had chosen to remember-1941; 1066; 1492-but nothing, ever, with consequences so vast as the year 2027, no, not since those earliest and forgotten dates when the first amphibian crawled out of the sea or the first hairy biped picked up a tool. Twenty twenty-seven topped them all. The Runaway Planet had slipped feloniously into the solar system, intent on burglary, and ever since it had been making off with its plunder.
Courageous human beings had blasted out into space to investigate. Three shiploads of them had actually landed on the Pyramid planet (they didn't know that was what it was, then.) They didn't even report, really. The first message back, right after touchdown, was, "It seems, ah, very barren." There wasn't any second.
Perhaps those landings were a mistake. Some thought so. Some thought that if the human race had cowered silent under its blanket of air the Pyramids might have run right through the ecliptic and away.
However, the triumphal "mistake" was made,
and that may have been the first time a human eye saw a Pyramid.
Shortly after-though not before the radio message was sent-that human eye winked out forever; but by then the damage was done. What passed in a Pyramid for "attention" had been attracted. The next thing that happened set the wireless channels between Palomar and Pernambuco, between Greenwich and the Cape of Good Hope, buzzing and worrying, as astronomers all over the Earth reported and confirmed and reconfirmed the astonishing fact that our planet was on the move. Rejoice in Messias had come to take us away.
A world of ten billion people, some of them brilliant, many of them brave, built and flung the giant rockets of Operation Up at the invader: Nothing.
The two ships of the Interplanetary Expeditionary Force were boosted up to no-gravity and dropped onto the new planet to strike back: Nothing.
Earth moved spirally outward. If a battle could not be won, then perhaps a migration. New ships were built in haste. But they lay there rusting as the sun grew small ana the ice grew thick; because where was there to go? Not Mars; not the Moon which was trailing along; not choking Venus or crushing Jupiter.
The migration was defeated as surely as the war, there being no place to migrate to.
One Pyramid came to Earth, only one. It shaved the crest off the highest mountain there
was, and squatted on it. An observer? A warden? Whatever it was, it stayed.
The Sun grew too distant to be of use, and out of the old Moon the Pyramid-aliens built a new small sun in the sky-a five-year sun, that burned out and was replaced, again and again and endlessly again. It had been a fierce struggle against unbeatable odds on the part of the ten billion; and when the uselessness of struggle was demonstrated at last, many of the ten billion froze to death, and many of them starved, and nearly all of the rest had something frozen or starved out of them; and what was left, two centuries and more later, was more or less like Citizen Boyne, except for a few, a very few, like Glenn Tropile.
Gala Tropile stared miserably at her husband. "-Want to get out of here," he was saying urgently. "They want to kill me. Gala, you know you can't make yourself suffer by letting them kill me!"
She wailed: "I can't!"
Tropile looked over his shoulder. Citizen Boyne was fingering the textured contrasts of a golden watch-case which had been his father s-and soon would be his son's. Boyne's eyes were closed and he wasn't listening.
Tropile leaned forward and deliberately put his hand on his wife's arm. She started and flushed, of course; he could feel her trembling.
"You can," he said, "and what's more, you will. You can help me get out of here. I insist on it, Gala, because I must save you that
pain." He took his hand off her arm, content. He said harshly: "Darling, don't you think I know how much we've always meant to each other?"
She looked at him wretchedly. Fretfully she tore at the billowing filmy sleeve of her summer blouse. The seams hadn't been loosened, there hadn't been time. She had just been getting into the appropriate Sun Re-creation Day costume, to be worn under the parka, when the messenger had come with the news about her husband.
She avoided his eyes. "If you're really Wolf. . ."
Tropile's sub-adrenals pulsed and filled him with confident strength. "Yew know what I am. You better than anyone else." It was a sly reminder of their curious furtive behavior together; like the hand on her arm, it had its effect. "After all, why do we quarrel the way we did last night?" He hurried on; the job of the rowel was to spur her to action, not to inflame a wound. "Because we're important to each other. I know that you would count on me to help if you were in trouble. And I know that you'd be hurt-deeply, Gala!-if I didn't count on you."