"Henry Kuttner - Fury UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

On Earth the Jurassic had passed before humans evolved into a reasoning race. Man is both tough and fragile. How fragile will be understood when a volcano erupts or the earth shakes. How tough will be understood when you know that colonies existed for as long as two months on the Venusian continents.

Man never knew the fury of the JurassicЧon Earth. On Venus it was worse. Man had no weapons to conquer the Venus lands. His weapons were either too weak or too potent. He could destroy utterly, or he could wound lightly, but he could not live on the surface of Venus. He was faced with an antagonist no man had ever known.

He faced fury . . . And he fled.

There was safety of a sort undersea. Science had perfected interplanetary travel and had destroyed Earth;

science could build artificial environments on the ocean bottom. The impervium domes were built Beneath them


Part I

DESPAIR thy charm;

And let the angel whom thou still hast serv'd Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother's womb Untimely ripp'd. ЧSHAKESPEARE

Sam Barker's birth was a double prophecy. It showed what was happening to the great Keeps where civilization's lights still burned, and it foreshadowed Sam's life in those underwater fortresses and out of them. His mother Bessi was a fragile, pretty woman who should have known better than to have a child. She was narrow-hipped and tiny, and she died in the emergency Caesarean that released Sam into a world that he had to smash before it could smash him.

That was why Blaze Barker hated bis son with such a blind, vicious hatred. Blaze could never think of the boy without remembering what had happened that night. He could never hear Sam's voice without hearing Bessi's thin, frightened screams. The caudal anesthesia hadn't helped much, because Bessi was psychologically as well as physically unfit for motherhood.

Blaze and BessiЧit was a Romeo and Juliet story with a happy ending, up to the time Sam was conceived. They were casual, purposeless hedonists. In the Keeps you had to choose. You could either find a drive, an incentiveЧbe

one of the technicians or artistsЧor you could drift. The technologies made a broad field, everything from thalas-sopolitics to the rigidly limited nuclear physics. But drifting was easy, if you could afford it. Even if you couldn't, lotus-eating was cheap in the Keeps. You simply didn't go in for the expensive pleasures like the Olympus rooms and the arenas.

Still, Blaze and Bessi could afford the best. Their idyll could make a saga of hedonism. And it seemed that it would have a happy ending, for in the Keeps it wasn't the individual who paid. It was the race that was paying.

After Bessi died, Blaze had nothing left except hatred.

These were the generations of Harker:

Geoffery begat Raoul; Raoul begat Zachariah; Zacha-riah begat Blazej and Blaze begat Sam.

Blaze relaxed in the cushioned seat and looked at his great-great-grandfather.

"You can go to the devil," he said. "All of you."

Geoffery was a tall, muscular, blond man with curiously large ears and feet. He said, "You talk like that because you're young, that's all. How old are you now? Nottwentyl"

'It's my affair," Bkze said.

"Ill be two hundred in another twenty years," Geoffery said. "I had sense enough to wait till I was past fifty before fathering a son. I had sense enough not to use my common-law wife for breeding. Why blame the child?"

Blaze stubbornly looked at his fingers.

His father Zachariah, who had been glaring silently, sprang up and snapped, "He's psychoticl Where he belongs is in a psych-hospital. They'd get the truth out of him!"

Blaze smiled. "I took precautions, Father," he said mildly. "I took a number of tests and exams before I came here today. Administration's approved my I.Q. and my sanity. I'm thoroughly compos mentis. Legally, too. There's nothing any of you can do, and you know it."