"Judith Merril - Wish Upon a Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

her down hullside again.
 He caught her glance across the table as the Lieutenant walked away and saw her wink at him. With
astonishment he thought, She's as happy as I am! She wants to go, too!
He knew, though he could not see as she bent over the carving, how her breasts had begun to swell
under her shirt, and he knew by heart, though they were hidden behind the table, the long clean curves of
those golden legs. Mechanically he added lentils to carrobeet top and passed a plate down, reminding
Adolph Liebnitz that there was a fork at his place, and he should use it. He answered a question of Irma's
without ever knowing what she asked, filled another plate, kept his eyes off Sarah thinking, This time . . .
this time I'll ... Added a little extra greens to Justin's plate, skimping on the carrobeets the kid hated . . .
This time I'll . . . Looked up, caught Sarah's eye again, felt himself going hot and red, and dropped the
thought.
He was in a warm daze still when Lieutenant Johnson mounted the rostrum to conclude the meal with
the evening prayer. Sheik chanted the familiar words of thanksgiving, suddenly meaningful, and looked
directly at Sarah as they finished, saying to her and her alone, "Survive in Peace!"
The Lieutenant read off the cleanup assignments, and then, just as casually as if she were making a
routine announcement instead of delivering a stomach punch, added, "There will be gameroom play for
Classes Three and Four till bedtime. Special Sessions girls are invited to attend a staff meeting in the
wardroom immediate!' after senior supper."
Sarah threw him a look of mild disappointment. "Tomorrow?" she mouthed. He didn't answer,
pretended not to see. Tomorrow? Sure. What difference did it make to her?
And then he was angry at himself. It wasn't Sarah's fault. And you couldn't blame her for being
excited about a wardroom meeting. It had to be something big for the Sessions to get asked in to
wardroom. He tried to meet her eye again, but everyone was getting up; people were moving; he caught
a glimpse of her back, and then couldn't see her at all. Desultorily, he drifted with the other older children
to the lounge and stood staring at the big screen.
The sun was big now, filling one whole sixteenth sector Maybe the meeting . . . ? He couldn't get
excited. There'd been too many false alarms when they began decelerating almost a year ago, rumors and
counter rumors and waves of excitement about how the tapes were coming out of the calckers, how it
was the planet . . . No, it was poisonous, ammonia atmosphere . . . No, it was just a barren sun . . . It
was the right one after all; it had a perfect earth-type atmosphere, one-third the mass . . .
Meaningless words, after all, to those who had been born on board Survival; words out of books.
The older people had been more excited than the kids. "Earth-type meant something to them.
But that was a year ago, and every day since, the sun had grown bigger on the plate, and no day had
brought any real news, except somewhere along the way it had been confirmed officially that there were
planets тАФtype as yet unknown. Bob said he thought it would be four or five more months before they
came in close enough to give the calckers anything to work on.
Last year, when they first been decelerating, Bob had talked a lot to Sheik, times when they were by
themselves in quarters, the little ones napping or asleep for the night. It was the first time, really, since
Sheik's nursery years that he and his father had been close. From the time he was six, when he was
assigned for training in the plant rooms, Abdur had grown to fill the role of father-advisor more and more.
But when the bright sun started to grow faintly brighter on the viewscreen, Bob's excitement was
uncontainable; he poured it out on his son, a boy incredibly grown to where, by the time a landing was
likely to take place, he would be in effect one of the men.
And the men, Bob told him, would have to work together when that happened. Things on a planet
would not be quite the same as on board ship. For weeks, Bob reminisced and daydreamed, talking
about Earth and its homes and families and governments, about the launching of the ship, Survival, and
how and why things were set up on board ship as they were.
Some of it Sheik had heard in class; other parts he was cautioned to forget except in private.
Everyone knew that the Survival was Earth's first starship, a colonizing expedition sent to find a planetтАФ
if there was oneтАФsuitable for the spillover of the world's crowded billions. Everyone knew the voyage