"Niven, Larry - Passerby" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

"I was wakened too late. The web had roman-candled, and was trailing the ship like a parachute that will not open. Wires must have touched, for much of the web was vaporized.
"It was my death," said the rammer. "Without the ramscoop web I was falling helplessly. I would enter the system of Koschei months too early, moving at nearly lightspeed, a dangerous missile. For my honor I must inform Koschei by laser, that I might be shot down before I arrive."
"Take it easy," I soothed him. His jaw had clenched, and the muscles that tightened in his face patterned the skin like a jigsaw puzzle. "Relax. It's all over. Smell the grass; you're on Earth now."
"I wept helplessly at first, though we consider weeping unmanly. . ." The rammer looked around him as if coming awake. "You are right. If I took off my shoes, would the law take offense?"
''No."
He took his shoes off and wiggled his toes in the grass. His feet were too small for him, and his toes were long and agile, almost prehensile.
No doctor had appeared yet. Probably the matronly woman had simply walked away to avoid being involved. In any case, the rammer's strength had returned.
He said, "On Koschei we tend to large girth. Gravity pulls less heavily at the meat of us. To qualify as a rammer I sweated away half my body weight, so that the unneeded two hundred earthweight pounds of me could be replaced by payload cargo."
"You must have wanted the stars badly."
"Yes. I was simultaneously learning disciplines whose very names most people can neither pronounce nor spell." The rammer pulled at his chin. The quilted skin stretched incredibly, and did not snap back immediately when he let go. "I cut my weight by half, yet my feet hurt when I walk the Earth. My skin has not yet shrunk to fit my smaller mass. Perhaps you noticed."
"What did you do about Koschei?"
"I sent the message. It would precede me to Koschei by just two ship's months."
"Then?"
"I thought to wait it out, to use what time was left to me. My taped library was adequate . . . but even in the face of death, I grew bored."
"After all, I had seen the stars before. Ahead they were blue-white and thickly clustered. To the side they were orange and red and somewhat sparse. Behind was black space, empty but for a handful of dying embers. Doppler shift made my velocity more than obvious. But there was no sense of motion, of going somewhere."
"A month and a half of this, and I was ready to go back to sleep."
"When the collision alarm went off, I tried to ignore it. My death was already certain. But the noise bothered me, and I went to the control room to shut it off. I saw then that a respectable mass was approaching, aimed dangerously, from behind."
"From behind! It was moving faster than my own ship! I searched among the sparse crimson dots with my scope at top magnification. Presently I found a golden man walking toward me."
"My first thought was that I had gone mad. My second was that my God had come for me. Then, as the intruder grew in the scope screen, I saw that it was not quite human."
"Somehow that made it better. A golden man walking between the stars was impossible. A golden alien was a lesser impossibility. At least I could examine it sanely."
"I found the alien larger than I had thought, much larger than human."
"It was a biped, definitely humanoid, with two arms and legs and a well-defined head. Its skin glowed like molten gold, all over, for it was hairless and without scales. Between its legs was nothing but smooth skin. Its feet were strange, without toes, and the knee and elbow joints were bulbous and knobby-"
"Were you really thinking in big expansive words like that?"
"I really was. I wanted to forget that I was terrified."
''Oh.''
"The intruder was nearing fast. Three times I lowered the magnification. Each time I saw him more clearly. His hands were three-fingered, with a long middle finger and two thumbs. The knees and elbows were too far down the limbs, but seemed quite flexible. The eyes-"
"Flexible? You saw them move?"
The rammer became agitated. He stuttered; he had to stop to gain control of himself. When he spoke again he seemed to force the words through his throat.
"I . . . decided that the intruder was not actually walking. But as it approached my ship, it seemed to be walking on empty space."
"Like a robot?"
"Like a not-quite-man. Like a Monk, perhaps, if we could see beneath the garment worn by Monk ambassadors."
''But-''
"Think of a man-sized humanoid." The rammer would not let me interrupt. "Think of him as belonging to a civilization advanced beyond our own. If his civilization had the power, and if he had the power within his civilization, and if he were very egotistical, then perhaps," said the rammer, "perhaps he might command that a spacecraft be built in his own image."
"That is the way I thought of the intruder, in the ten minutes it took the intruder to reach me. I could not believe that a humanoid with smooth, molten gold skin would evolve in vacuum, nor that he could walk on emptiness. The humanoid shape is for gravity, for planets."
"Where does engineering become art? Once our ground-bound automobiles looked like spacecraft. An advanced spacecraft might be made to look like a given man, and move like him, yet still have the capabilities of a spacecraft. The man himself would ride inside. If a king or millionaire could cause this to be done, why, then he would stride like a god across the stars.''
"I wonder if you don't think of yourself in just that way."
The rammer was astonished. "Me? Nonsense. I am a simple rammer. But I find man-shaped spacecraft easier to believe in than golden giants walking on emptiness."
"More comforting, too."
"Yes." The rammer shuddered. "It came up very fast, so that I must damp the magnification to keep him in view. His middle finger was two joints longer than ours, and the thumbs were of different sizes. His eyes were set freakishly far apart, and too low in the head. They glowed red with their own light. His mouth was a wide, lipless horizontal line."
"Not once did I think to avoid the intruder. We could not have reached a collision course by accident. I assumed that he had altered course to follow me, and would alter course again to protect us."
"He was on me before I knew it. I had flipped the magnification down another notch, and when I looked the setting was at zero. I looked up at the sparse red stars, and found a golden dot as it exploded into a golden man."
"I blinked, of course. When my eyes opened he was reaching for me."
"For you?"
The rammer nodded convulsively. "For the pod of my ship. He was much larger than the pod, or rather, his ship was."
"You still thought it was a ship?" I would not have asked; but he kept changing the pronoun.
"I was looking for windows in the forehead and the chest. I did not find them. He moved like a very large man."
"I hate to suggest it," I said, "not knowing your religion. Could there be gods?"
He jumped as if stung. "Nonsense."
"How about superior beings? If we've evolved beyond the chimpanzees, couldn't-"
"No. Absolutely not," said the rammer. "You don't understand modern xenology. Do you not know that we and the Monks and the Smithpeople are all of equal intelligence? The Smithpeople are not remotely humanoid in shape, yet it makes no difference. When a species begins to use tools, evolution stops."