"Henry Kuttner - The Sky is Falling UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

"You can't have everything."

"Guess not. Still, it almost seems like hi this set-up you got planned, I could wish for anything and just get it. If I wished for a womanЧ" He snorted. "I might get Poochie, come to think of it. Oh, Lord. Maybe later we could put the robot to work on quasi-biology. I recollect something about surrogate plasms. If I could rig the genes in advance I could maybe work out a nice, comfortable little lady and speed up her growing tune. Wonder how long it'd take her to hit biological twenty? It's an idea, Johnny, it's an idea."

"Sure, why not? Wish on a star. All you need's to be on the right star. This is it. We can do anything we want, and there's nobody to stop us."

"Martine," White said.

"Two against one. Benjy?"

"Yeah?" i



"We can do it. Right now."

White's brows lifted.

"What's happened? NotЧ" His face changed/ He tilted his head to stare at the dull reflection in the ceiling. Beyond it he was seeing the night sky and the blue-green star of Earth.

"Oh no, no," Dyson said quickly. "Not the Blow-Up. Not yet, anyhow."

White shrugged. "May never come," he said, and stretched his arm out for a cigarette on the table beside him. "May never come at all."

"It'll come," Dyson said quietly. "It doesn't matter a hoot whether or not our cargo gets back to Earth. Ever since the Forties physicists have been looking for an atomic safety, and if they couldn't even find it through artificial radio-elements, Jwhat good can Martian ores do? We've wasted six months mining junk."

"Can't tell that," White said, blowing smoke. "We got no equipment for refining and testing. All we do is hunt, dig and load. The rest is up to the physics boys."

Dyson shook his head.

"It'll come," he insisted. "Ever since Alamogordo it's been coming. So I say, what's the use of going back? All you'll get out of it's jail. All I'll get isЧoh, I don't know. More hard work, more worries, the same old routine. And for what? The Blow-Up. That's all. Why work?"

White, sitting on the edge of'the bunk, humped himself forward, elbows on knees, cigarette dangling from his lips. The wires of the helmet cast complex shadows over his face. He didn't answer.

Dyson said eagerly, "We can pull our plan right now, Benjy. Marline's micro-photographing the log. He'll be busy for a couple of hours more anyway. We'll have all the tune we need to hide the fuel."

White tried absently to scratch his head and tangled his fingers in a maze of insulated wiring.

"Not so fast," he said. "What's the big rush? We got to think this over. I'm not going to haul that fuel around. Even if I had lead skin, I'd still say no thanks."

"Who's asking you to haul fuel? All you've got to do is hand over that transmitter."

White looked at him sidewise. His eyes grew slightly glassy. "Hold on there. The robot's got to stay ener-

gized. It takes somebody's mind to do that. If I took it

offЧ"

"I'd put it on."