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

Why haven't I been wondering about the biological package probes?

A moment later he did wonder.

What are the biological package probes?

But the wonder was that he had never wondered.

He knew what and where they were: heavy fat cylinders arranged around the waist of the starship's hull. Ten of these, each weighing almost as much as Corbett's own life-support system. He knew their mass distribution. He knew the clamp system that held them to the hull and he could operate and repair the clamps under various extremes of damage. He almost knew where the probes went when released; it was just on the tip of his tongue-which meant he had had the RNA shot but had not yet seen the instructions.

But he did not know what the probes were for.

It was like that with the ship, he realized. He knew everything there was to know about a seeder ramship, but nothing at all about the other kinds of ramship or interplanetary travel or ground-to-orbit vehicles. He knew that he would be launched by linear accelerator from the moon. He knew the design of the accelerator-he could see it, three hundred and fifty kilometers of rings standing on end in a line across a level lunar mare. He knew what to do if anything went wrong during launch. And that was all he knew about the moon and lunar installations and lunar conquest, barring what he had watched on television two hundred years ago.

What was going on out there? In the two weeks since his arrival (awakening? resuscitation?) he had seen four rooms and two rooftops, glimpsed a fantastic cityscape from a bridge and talked to one man who was not interested in telling him anything. What had happened in two hundred years?

These men and women who slept around him. Who were they? Why were they here? He didn't even know if they were corpsicles or contemporary. Probably. contemporary. Not one of them was self-conscious about the facilities.

Corbett had raised his buildings in all sorts of strange places but he had never jumped blind. He had always brushed up on the language and studied the customs before he went Here he had no handle, nowhere to start. He was lost.

If only he had someone he could really talk to!

He was learning in enormous gulps, taking in volumes of knowledge so broad that he hadn't realized how rigidly bounded they were. The State was teaching him only what he needed to know or might need to know some time. Every bit of information was aimed straight at his profession.

Rammer.

He could see the reasoning. He would be gone for several centuries. Why should the State teach him anything at all about today's technology, customs, geography? There would be trouble enough when he came back if he-come to think of it, who had taught him to call the government the State? He knew nothing of its power and extent. How had he come to think of the State as all-powerful?

It must be the RNA training. With data came attitudes below the conscious level, where he couldn't get at them.

What were they doing to him?

He had lost his world. He would lose this one. According to Pierce, he had lost himself four times already. A condemned criminal had had his personality wiped four times. Now Corbett's beliefs and motivations were being lost bit by bit to the RNA solution as the State made him over into a rammer.

Was there nothing that was his?

He failed to see Pierce at exercise period. It was just as well. He was somewhat groggy. As usual, he ate dinner like a starving man. He returned to the dorm, rolled into his bunk and was instantly asleep.

He looked up during study period the next day and found Pierce watching him. He blinked, fighting free of a mass of data on the attitude jet system that bled plasma from the inboard fusion plant that was also the emergency electrical power source-and asked, "Pierce, what's a biological package probe?"

"I would have thought they would teach you that. You know what to do with the probes, don't you?"

"The teaching widget gave me the procedure two days ago. Slow up for certain systems, kill the fields, turn a probe loose and speed up again."

"You don't have to aim them?"

"No, I guess they aim themselves. But I have to get them down to a certain relative velocity to get them into the system"

"Amazing. They must do all the rest of it themselves." Pierce shook his head. "I wouldn't have believed it. Well, Corbett, the probes steer for a terrestrial world with a reducing atmosphere. They outnumber oxygen-nitrogen worlds about three to one in this arm of the galaxy and probably everywhere else, too-as you may know, if your age got that far."