"The Fittest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

When Terry began trying to explain, Gottlieb interrupted with a long, interminable story about the baby sayings of his youngest daughter, and pulled out his wallet to show him her picture. He carried pictures of all his children and was always ready to talk about them, but this time it came to Terry that the round-faced little engineer had deliberately changed the subject, so he left it at that.



Venus was coming very close, a great dark globe showing a narrow ribbon of sunlight around one side.

"Maybe there is life," Gottlieb said. Terry was not prepared for what came next. "What puzzles me is why you want to save these Venusians. Why do you want to, Terry?"

The full, ruthless implications of that sank in slowly. Terry turned from the viewplate with a feeling of shock. "If I don't, they will die," he pointed out carefully, as if to a child.

The chubby engineer laughed. "If the amoebas had worried about that, we would still be amoebas. Only the fittest should survive. Differential breeding. How else can we have a better race, eh? Progress is built on death."

"You talk like a fascist," Terry pointed out, quietly, as he would have pointed out that Anton Gustav Gottlieb had leprosy. The little engineer merely looked at him soberly and picked up a book.

Terry mastered himself and thereafter avoided political topics and the subject of saving Venusians, painfully aware of the danger of making the trip intolerable with quarrels. He mentioned it just once again as they watched Venus turning under its eternal blanket of dust storms. "Give them a break," he said. "They have as much right to live as we do."

Gottlieb said dreamingly, "Life belongs to the future." They looked at each other for a moment of pure antagonism.

"It belongs to nothing!" Terry snapped, and then they went into the dust cloud of Venus and were too busy to talk.

Dusty wind, rocks, high-piled flowing dust dunes, weirdly scoured mountains, black vitreous chimneys of forgotten volcanoes, sudden torrential rains that condensed in the stratosphere and then evaporated again before they reached the ground, heavier rains that reached the ground and scoured gullies in the dust without wetting it, and left the gullies to be filled again with dust in one sweep of wind, and over it all heat, a dry constant heat of 120 degrees. They were the first humans on Venus.

Terry forgot his temper.

They flew back and forth over the weirdly beautiful, sterile landscape, combing for signs of life and arguing cheerfully on which formula for a locus of chemical imbalance should be used first. The temperature was too stable and the light too dim for a radiation imbalance. They decided on the geologic formula and began to take soundings at likely ridges.

At the end of the second day, when tempers were wearing thin and eyes were beginning to blur with the strain, they found a hollow section in a water-bearing ridge, found its open end, put on space suits to give them air and keep them cool, and went in.

It was there.

First it was merely a crevice with sand and fine dust drifted in to make a level floor, but there were footprints. Then there were furry cublike creatures who fled before them, leaving the sand heaps of play fortresses and tunnels, and a trail of small footprints. And there was an aura about the placeЧa mood.

They turned on their helmet lights and walked onward, listening to distant shrill squeaks at the edge of audibility. "They have a double-sight system, maybe," Gottlieb said, stooping slightly as the cleft smoothed to a small rough corridor. УLight and sound. Sound is for seeing in the dark. They are smaller than people," he added absently, stooping lower as his helmet brushed the ceiling, but the deduction did not seem important, for they would see them soon and tell them all about Earth. Terry found himself thinking of astonishing tales to tell them about Earth.

"They are very friendly," he said gratefully. He had never felt this form of telepathy before, a communion of feeling instead of thoughts, but it was astonishing how right it seemed, like coming home to a family after being with strangers.

УLike relatives, thought sharing with one another," Gottlieb muttered. "Useful," then again, "Good!" as he passed an intersection of tunnels with bracing that showed a keen understanding of structural principles. The work was done in stone, with only a few touches of some soft metal, gold or silver, that needed no smelting.

Presently the two Earthmen came upon them working in the depth of the mine, channeling and conserving a faint trickle of water. The leader one stopped work for a moment to come forward and greet them. His fur was not exactly fur, but something more like brown velvet, but otherwise he was very like a small brown bear. He looked at them with intelligent, interested brown eyes, and after hesitating a moment took their extended hands and shook them, and returned to work. They fell to and helped.

"Evolved from a water-digging animal," said Gottlieb. "Probably a water-fueled metabolism. Carbon from the air and energy from the temperature differential of evaporation. This air is dry."

He paused, holding a long flat slab of rock. The leader one spoke a few words of precise direction, interested by the clumsiness of the strangers.

"I beg your pardon," Gottlieb said gently, smiling. "I don't understand you, Mr. Teddy Bear." The native made a gesture of apology and pointed. Gottlieb placed the slab carefully where indicated. "They have a language," he said simply. It showed that the telepathy needed some supplement. It was as vague to the community of bears as it was to the Earthman. Terry and Gottlieb worked on for a while, and then sat down and leaned against a wall to relax, with their lights off. They could hear the natives working steadily, tapping and grinding, and sometimes lighting the dark for themselves with a supersonic beep.

"Well have to go back for more oxygen cylinders soon," Terry said.

"Yes," said Gottlieb.