"1 The Integral Trees" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

At least the crew were not extinct.

That would have hurt him terribly.

He had done his duty. Their ancestors had been mutineers, a potential threat to the State itself. To reeducate their descendants was his goal, but if the Smoke Ring had killed them . . . well, it would not have surprised him. It took more than breathable air to keep men alive. The Smoke Ring was green with the life that had evolved for that queer environment. Native life might well have killed of those Johnny-comelately rivals, the erstwhile crew of the seeder ramship Discipline.

Sharls would have grieved; but he would have been free to return home.

They'd call me an obsolete failure, he thought gloomily while his instruments sought a particular frequency in the radio range. A thousand years out of date by the time I'm home. They'd scrap the computer for certain. And the program? The Sharls Davis Kendy program might be copied and kept for the use of historians Or noL

But they hadn't died. Eight Cargo and Repair Modules had gone with the original mutineers. Time and the corrosive environment must have ruined the CARMs; but at least one was still operational. Someone bad been using it as late as six years ago. And-there: the light he'd been searching for. For a moment it reached him clearly: the frequency of hydrogen burning with oxygen.

He fired a maser in ultrashort, high-powered pulses. "Kendy for the State. Kendy for the State. Kendy for the State."

The response came four seconds later, sluggish, weak, and blurred. Kendy pinpointed it and fine-focused his telescopes while he sent his next demand.

"Status. Tell me three times."

Kendy sorted the garbled respofise through a noise-eliminator program. The CARM was on manual, mostly functional, using attitude jets only, operating well inside its safety limits. Once it had been a simplified recording of Kendy's own personality. Now the program was deteriorating, growing stupid and erratic.

"Course record for the past hour."

It came. The CARM had been free-falling at low relative velocity up to forty minutes ago. Then, low-acceleration maneuvers, a course that looked like a dropped plate of spaghetti, a mad waste of stored fuel. Malfunction? Or . . . it could have been a dogfight-style battle.

War?

"Switch to my command."

Four seconds; then a signal like a scream of bewildered agony. Massive malfunction.

The crew must have disconnected the autopilot system on every one of the CARMs, half a thousand years ago. It had still been worth a try, as was his next message.

"Give me video link with crew."

"Denied."

Oh ho! The video link hadn't been disconnected! A block must have been programmed in, half a thousand years ago, by the mutineers. Certainly their descendants wouldn't know how to do that.

A block might be circumvented, eventually.

The CARM was too small to see, of course, but it must be somewhere near that green blob not far from Goldblatt's World. A cotton-candy forest. Plants within the Smoke Ring tended to be fluffy, fragile. They spread and divided to collect as much sunlight as possible, without worrying about gravity.

For half a thousand years Kendy had watched for signs of a developing civilization-for regular patterns in the floating masses, or infrared radiation from manufacturing centers, or industrial pollution: metal vapor, carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen. He hadn't found any of that. If the children of Discipline's crew were developing beyond savagery, it was not in any great numbers.

But they lived. Someone was using a CARM.

If only he could see them! Or talk to them-"Give me voiceover. Citizen, this is Kendy for the State. Speak, and your reward will be beyond the reach of your imagination."

"Amplify. Amplify. Amplify," sent the CARM.