"William Morrison - The Sack" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrison William)

committee vote was four to three in favor of Siebling, and the decision was
confirmed by the Senate. And then Senator Horrigan passed temporarily out of the
Sack's life and out of Siebling's.

Siebling looked forward with some trepidation to his first long interview with the
Sack. Hitherto he had limited himself to the simple tasks provided for in his
directivesтАФto the maintenance of the meteor shelter dome, to the provision of a
sparse food supply, and to the proper placement of an army and Space Fleet Guard.
For by this time the great value of the Sack had been recognized throughout the
system, and it was widely realized that there would be thousands of criminals
anxious to steal so defenseless a treasure.
Now, Siebling thought, he would be obliged to talk to it, and he feared that he
would lose the good opinion which it had somehow acquired of him. He was in a
position strangely like that of a young girl who would have liked nothing better than
to talk of her dresses and her boy friends to someone with her own background, and
was forced to endure a brilliant and witty conversation with some man three times
her age.
But he lost some of his awe when he faced the Sack itself. It would have been
absurd to say that the strange creature's manner put him at ease. The creature had no
manner. It was featureless and expressionless, and even when part of it moved, as
when it was speaking, the ef-fect was completely impersonal. Nevertheless,
something about it did make him lose his fears.
For a time he stood before it and said nothing. To his surprise, the Sack
spokeтАФthe first time to his knowledge that it had done so without being asked a
question. "You will not disappoint me," it said. "I ex-pect nothing. "
Siebling grinned. Not only had the Sack never before volunteered to speak, it had
never spoken so dryly. For the first time it began to seem not so much a mechanical
brain as the living creature he knew it to be. He asked, "Has anyone ever before
asked you about your origin?"
"One man. That was before my time was rationed. And even he caught himself
when he realized that he might better be asking how to become rich, and he paid little
attention to my answer."
"How old are you?"
"Four hundred thousand years. I can tell you to the fraction of a second, but I
suppose that you do not wish me to speak as precisely as usual."
The thing, thought Siebling, did have in its way a sense of humor. "How much of
that time," he asked, "have you spent alone?"
"More than ten thousand years."
"You told someone once that your companions were killed by meteors. Couldn't
you have guarded against them?"
The Sack said slowly, almost wearily, "That was after we had ceased to have an
interest in remaining alive. The first death was three hundred thousand years ago."
"And you have lived, since then, without wanting to?"
"I have no great interest in dying either. Living has become a habit."
"Why did you lose your interest in remaining alive?"
"Because we lost the future. There had been a miscalculation."
"You are capable of making mistakes?"
"We had not lost that capacity. There was a miscalcu-lation, and although those
of us then living escaped per-sonal disaster, our next generation was not so
fortunate. We lost any chance of having descendants. After that, we had nothing for