"Larry Niven - The Integral Trees (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)
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
file:///F|/rah/Larry%20Niven/Niven,%20Larry%20-%20The%20Integral%20Trees.txt
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.
Kendy was already sending at full amplification. "Cancel voiceover," he sent.
Not for the first time, he wondered if the Smoke Ring could have proved too kindly an
environment. Creatures evolved in freefall would not have human strength. Huin~nc~ could be the
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