"Michael McCollum - Who Will Guard the Guardians" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

lifted her eyes to the sky. The stars seemed steel hard points of radiance, as chilly as the wind around
her. She was filled with sadness as she caught sight of a star that moved slowly from west to east in
violation of nature's order.

There had been a time long ago when fathers held their children aloft and pointed out the moving lights
that were the great space stations, the jumping off places for the far planets. No longer. Now the sight
of the sky derelicts only served to remind people of The Destruction. Few stargazed as a result.

Fria was different. She had long ago ceased to fear the sky. Now it held only a pleasant sadness for
her, a wistfulness for that which might have been. The old memories spilled forth in abundance. In many
ways, they were clearer than those of the year just past. She shuddered at the thought. The ability to
recall your childhood (but not your morning) was one of the first symptoms of creeping senility.

Her clearest early memories were of her father telling her stories of the time before The Troubles; the
time when man's future had seemed unlimited, the time before the aliens came. In those days, it had
seemed as though humans had finally tamed their warlike nature as they spread throughout the solar
system. Their settlements dotted the surface of Mars, the Asteroid Belt, and the moons of Jupiter and
Saturn. Their mines scarred the surfaces of fiery Mercury and frigid Pluto. Their orbital cities grew rich
and prosperous. Only the far stars were left for conquest and humanity was thinking about mounting the
effort.

Then the aliens came.

Their interstellar ships were wolves among Earth's interplanetary sheep. Only when they came up against
fixed planetary defenses did they show any vulnerability. Even then, however, humanity was able to
achieve little better than a standoff. The best computers Earth possessed gave space-going civilization
less than two centuries to live if nothing were done to change the odds.

Something was done. Human weapons research was easily on a par with that of the aliens. Only in the
development of interstellar craft was humanity behind its tormentors. The solar system's leaders decreed
a punitive expedition be launched to carry the battle to the aliens' home star. The expedition would take
nearly a century to cross the black gulf of space, far too long for anyone then alive to survive the voyage.
To provide the expedition with crewmembers, a crash program of research into drastically extending
human life span was begun.

The scientists worked for twenty years while Starship Vengeance was slowly assembled in orbit. A
decade after Fria's birth, they found their answer. It was not a perfect answer by any means - more than
a million laboratory animals had died in the experiments - but it was an answer, of sorts

If the subject was female and on the verge of sexual maturity ... if she possessed a rare factor in her
blood ... if these and a hundred other parameters were exactly right, then it was sometimes possible to
extend the human life span to half a thousand years or more. The first success had been Pounce, the cat,
for a few years the most famous "person" on Earth.

Then had come the human volunteers. Grisly experiments established that the chances of success were
less than one in a hundred. In the end, however, fifty little girls emerged from the treatment tanks after
more than two years of therapy, each ready to take the war to the enemy.

The enemy never gave them that chance.