"Judith Merril - Pioneer Stock" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

PIONEER STOCK
Dear Burt:
I deeply regret the necessity for what I must do, darling. You see, I am returning your ring by
registered post. I need hardly tell you that this reluctant action represents no change of sentiment
on my part. But after your last visit, and in view of the decision you have come to since, I have no
other possible choice...

TWO YEARS AGO, when both of them were just past being children, he had given her the ring.
Deena had worn it proudly ever since, and it shone brighter in the world's sight than her own gleaming
beauty. It shone brighter because she saw to it that no man could notice her without noticing as well the
ring that committed her to one man alone.
Every night since then she had gone to sleep holding hands with herself: the fingers of one hand
ardently stroking and caressing the slender band of metal which she wore on the other. And each time he
was home from school, for a day or a week, or through the two long glorious vacations, she had
struggled between the pounding needs of her own blood, and the restraining memory of the blood of her
ancestors.
Each time she had won the fight untilтАФhis imperative accumulated urgency, more than her own, had
overcome at last the shame and the fear.
...alternative. My grandfather, as you know, was a pioneer here on Ganymede. My
grandmother...
And now the very memory of that urgency, and of the wonder and mystery of those two nights
before his departure, and of the burning in her body ever since, had left her no other choice but this. She
knew her heritage well enough, and always had.
But now she knew exactly how he felt too. They could have waited, and endured the last year still
ahead. But another year after that, or three or fiveтАФthe time which must of necessity elapse before she
could join him on the far frontier they would send him toтАФno, it was unthinkable.
She sat at the table in her own room, the room in which she had grown up, and would almost surely
live all the rest of her life, and stared at the last two words she had written: My grandmother.
She couldn't tell him after all. She would have to go back too far, explaining. He would read the
words, and never even know what they meant.
...My grandmother was not a happy woman, though she loved her husband dearly, and he her in
return.
That much was true, no matter which grandmother you were speaking of.
Perhaps it is unfitting in the descendant of "pioneer heroes" to be so fearful but... Burt didn't
know. Nobody knew except the family, and perhaps a few old-timers who didn't talk. When the whole
world knows part of the story, the part that's not fit to be known is buried deeper than usual.
...but perhaps it is just exactly that background of growing up in a household where the stories of
pioneer days and pioneer hardships were so much a part of my conditioning...

***

Thatcher and Leseur came out on the same ship, but they didn't team up right away. Life on
Ganymede was not so tough that you had to have a partner to survive. If you could stand being alone
almost all the time, it was smarter to keep your pickings to yourself. There was plenty of room then for
everybody, and plenty of uranium scattered about, and the Dzairdee, the graceful, green-skinned peoples
who were native to the satellite, were as timid as they were backward, and thus represented no menace
to the roaming prospectors.
Phil Thatcher had always been a lonely man, even in the crowded cities of Earth. For him the rocky
heights and wilderness valleys of Ganymede were a natural and suitable environment. If every now and
then he crossed the trail of a fellow fortune hunter, and spent a day or two in human company, he found it