"Pohl, Frederik - The Mother Trip" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

his file the datum that the violence has been withdrawn, but only out of
neatness. The file is now complete. No more will be added.
The policeman cautions him against walking alone in the city at night,
mentioning the risk of being robbed or harmed. He advises Moolkri to carry
identification at all times. He gets back into his car, hesitates, then says,
with half a smile and a cursory salute, "Y'all enjoy your stay in Jackson now,
hear?
But it is too late.
The automatic orbiting guardians have already reacted to Moolkri's broadcast
danger of violence, as they were programmed to do. The spacecraft with Mawkri
and the Get lifts and flees screaming into the sky. And the first planet busters
begin to drop.
Fusion infernos blossom and burst. Cities slide into the already boiling sea.
Mawkri's motherhood has punished the offense.
It is the end of the world of human beings, except as a blob of molten rock, and
that is one way it could have been.
Or it could have been like this, that all of Moolkri Mawkri's Get remained in
orbit, thundering down motherly orders to be obeyed:
Under pain of destruction!
Humans are commanded!
Alternative is the planet busters, and the end of your world!
In this version the Get prudently refrained from landing but after careful study
of all radio and television transmissions elected to play a mother's arduous
role from out in space. So they made a plan and ordered the world to carry it
out. Six representatives of humankind were to present themselves, unarmed and
tractable, in orbit: one each from China, the United States, Sweden, Rhodesia,
Brazil, and the U.S.S.R.
The Get, here, too, had carefully studied all the EMF transmissions from Tokyo
Tower and London's GPO and the American networks. The Get thought that most of
them were very funny. Nevertheless they decoded them into aural and visual
signals and analyzed them for meaning and implications.
Both Moolkri and Mawkri agreed that this complicatedly comic planet needed to be
taken into the motherhood of Mawkri, and in this version they studied the means
of manipulation nations and persons used upon each other. They were aware of the
human custom of giving each other ultimatums: thus the commands from space. They
were not as aware of certain other human habits. They were taken quite by
surprise when, united in a common purpose at last, all six of the nations that
had a nuclear missile capability conferred through their secret hot lines, set a
time, and fired simultaneously upon the orbiting spaceship of Moolkri Mawkri and
the Get.
Of the resulting swarm of missiles it happened to be a cold-launched American
Minuteman III that destroyed the ship, the Get, Moolkri, and Mawkri herself, and
ended the first contact between their people and ours.
There is, however, a warmer and more loving version.
In this version Moolkri spoke up:
"I do not think we can trust ourselves to these creatures, he said. "Neither do
I think we should reveal ourselves to them, either for communication or to
impose our helpful will on them. Let's cool it while we figure things.
There was some resistance to this, particularly from a forensicist and a KP
pusher in the Get. That was right and proper. It was their function to do that.