"Theodore Sturgeon - Killdozer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

KILLDOZER!
Theodore Sturgeon
Before the race was the deluge, and before the deluge another race, whose nature it is not for
mankind to understand. Not unearthly, not alien, for this was their earth and their home.

There was a war between this race, which was a great one, and another. The other was truly
alien, a sentient cloudform, an intelligent grouping of tangible electrons. It was spawned in mighty
machines by some accident of a science beyond our aboriginal conception of technology. And then
the machines, servants of the people, became the people's masters, and great were the battles that
followed. The electron-beings had the power to wrap the delicate balances of atom-structure, and
their life-medium was mental, which they permeated and used to their own ends. Each weapon the
people developed was possessed and turned against them, until a time when the remnants of that
vast civilization found a defenceтАФ

An insulator. The terminal product or by-product of all energy researchтАФneutronium.

In its shelter they developed a weapon. What it was we shall never know, and our race will liveтАФ
or we shall know, and our race will perish as theirs perished. Sent to destroy the enemy, it got out
of hand and its measureless power destroyed them with it, and their cities, and their possessed
machines. The very earth dissolved inflame, the crust writhed and shook and the oceans boiled.
Nothing escaped it, nothing that we know as life, and nothing of the pseudolife that had evolved
within the mysterious force-fields of their incomprehensible machines, save one hardy mutant.

Mutant it was, and ironically this one alone could have been killed by the first simple measures
used against its kindтАФbut it was past time for simple expediences. It was an organized
electron-field possessing intelligence and mobility and a will to destroy, and little else. Stunned by
the holocaust, it drifted over the grumbling globe, and in a lull in the violence of the forces gone
wild on Earth, sank to the steaming ground in its half-conscious exhaustion. There it found shelter
тАФshelter built by and for its dead enemies. An envelope of neutronium. It drifted in, and its
consciousness at last fell to its lowest ebb. And there it lay while the neutronium, with its strange
constant flux, its interminable striving for perfect balance, extended itself and closed the opening.
And thereafter in the turbulent eons that followed, the envelope tossed like a grey bubble on the
surface of the roiling sphere, for no substance on Earth would have it or combine with it.

The ages came and went, and chemical action and reaction did their mysterious work, and once
again there was life and evolution. And a tribe found the mass of neutronium, which is not a
substance but a static force, and were awed by its aura of indescribable chill, and they worshipped
it and built a temple around it and made sacrifices to it. And ice and fire and the seas came and
went, and the land rose and fell as the years went by, until the ruined temple was on a knoll, and
the knoll was an island. Islanders came and went, lived and built and died, and races forgot. So
now, somewhere in the Pacific to the west of the archipelago called Islas Revillagigedas, there
was an uninhabited island. And one dayтАФ

*****

Chub Horton and Tom Jaeger stood watching the Sprite and her squat tow of three cargo lighters
dwindle over the glassy sea. The big ocean-going towboat and her charges seemed to be moving out of
focus rather than travelling away. Chub spat cleanly around the cigar that grew out of the corner of his
mouth.
'That's that for three weeks. How's it feel to be a guinea pig?"