"Joan D. Vinge, txt v2.0, To Bell the Cat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Joan D)

Corouda stood up, brushing at his pants. Jary spent his time outside while Orr was dissecting; Piper Alvarian Jary, who had served a man who made Attila the Hun, Hitler, and Kahless look like nice guys. Corouda wondered if it were possible that he really didn't like to watch.

Albe stood with him and stretched. "What did you think of that? That's the real Piper Alvarian Jary, all right. 'Better them than me ... just a bunch of animals.' He probably thinks we're all a bunch of animals."

Corouda watched Jary disappear into the tent. "Wouldn't surprise me at all."

- - - - - - -

Piper Alvarian Jary picked his way cautiously over the rough, slagged surface of the narrow cave ledge, setting down one foot and then the other like a puppeteer. Below him, some five meters down the solid rock surface here, lay the shallow liquid surface of the radioactive mud. He rarely looked down at it, too concerned with lighting a path for his own feet. Their geological tests had shown that a seven-meter layer forty meters down in the boiling mud held a freakish concentration of fissile ores, hot enough once to have eaten out this strange, contorted subterranean world. He risked a glance out into the pitch blackness, his headlamp spotlighting grotesque formations cast from molten rock; silvery metallic stalactites and stalagmites, reborn from vaporized ores. Over millennia the water-saturated mass of mud and uranium had become exothermic and then cooled, sporadically, in one spot and then another. Like some immense witches' caldron, the whole underground had simmered and sputtered for nearly half a million years.

Fumes rising in Jary's line of sight shrouded his vision of the tormented underworld; he wondered vaguely whether the smell would be unpleasant, if he could remove the helmet of his radiation suit. Someone else might have thought of Hell, but that image did not occur to him.

He stumbled, coming up hard against a jagged outcropping. Orr's suited form turned back to look at him, glittered in the dancing light of his own headlamp. "Watch out for that case!"

He felt for the bulky container slung against his hip, reassuring his nerveless body that its contents were still secure. Huddled inside it, creeping over one another aimlessly, were the half dozen sluggish, rat-sized troglodytes they had captured this trip. He turned his light on them, but they did not respond, gazing stupidly at him and through him from the observation window. "It's all right, D - doctor."

Orr nodded, starting on. Jary ducked a gleaming stalactite, moved forward quickly before the safety line between them jerked taut. He was grateful for the line, even though he had heard the warden named Hyacin-Soong call it his leash. Hyacin-Soong followed behind him now with the other warden, Corouda, who had asked him to play squamish this morning. He didn't expect them to ask him again; he knew that he had antagonized Hyacin-Soong somehow - maybe just by existing. Corouda still treated him with benign indifference.

Jary glanced again at the trogs, wishing suddenly that Orr would give up on them and take him home. He wanted the safety of the Simeu Institute, the security of the known. He was afraid of his clumsiness in these alien surroundings, afraid of the strangers, afraid of displeasing Orr.... He let the air out of his constricted lungs in a long sigh. Of course he was afraid; he had good reason to be. He was Piper Alvarian Jary.

But Orr would never give up on the trogs, until he either broke the secret code of their alien genes or ran out of specimens to work with. Orr wanted above all to discover how they had adapted to the cave in the geologically short span of time the reactor had been stable - everyone in the expedition wanted to know that. But even the trogs' basic biology confounded him: what the functions were of the four variant kinds he had observed; how they reproduced when they appeared to be sexless, at least by human standards; what ecological niches they filled, with such hopelessly rudimentary brains. And particularly, how their existence was thermodynamically possible. Orr believed that they seined nutrients directly from the radioactive mud, but even he couldn't accept the possibility that their food chain ended in nuclear fission. The trogs themselves were faintly radioactive; they were carbon-based, could withstand high pressures, and perceived stimuli far into the short end of the EM spectrum. And that was all that Orr was certain of, so far.

Jary clung with his gloved hands to the rough wall above the ledge as it narrowed, and remembered touching the trogs. Once, when he was alone, he had taken off his protective gloves and held one of them in his bare hands. Its scaled, purplish-gray body had not been cold and slippery as he had imagined, but warm, sinuous, and comforting. He had held onto it for as long as he dared, craving the sensual, sensory pleasure of its motion and the alien texture of its skin. He had caressed its small unresponsive body, while it repeated over and over the same groping motions unperturbed, like an untended machine. And his hands had trembled with the same confusion of shame and desire that he always knew when he handled the experimental animals....

There had been a time when he had played innocently with the soft, supple, pink-eyed mice and rabbits, the quick, curious monkeys, and the iridescent fletters. But then Orr had begun training him as an assistant; and observation of the progress of induced diseases, the clearing away of entrails and blood, the disposal of small, ruined bodies in the incinerator chute had taught him their place, and his own. Animals had no rights and no feelings. But when he held the head of a squirming mouse between his fingers and looked down into the red, amorphous eyes, when he caught its tail for the jerk that would snap its spine, his hands trembled....

The ground trembled with the strain of pent-up pressures; Jary fell to his knees, not feeling the bruising impact. Behind him he heard the curses of the wardens and saw Orr struggle to keep his own balance up ahead. When his hands told him the tremor had passed, he began to crawl toward Orr, using his hands to feel his way, his palms cold with sweat. He could not compensate for unexpected motion; it was easier to crawl.

"Piper!" Orr jerked on the safety line. "Get up, you're dragging the specimen box."

Jary felt the wardens come up behind him, and heard one of them laugh. The goad of sudden sharp memory got him to his feet; he started on, not looking back at them. He had crawled after the first operation, the one that had killed his sense of touch - using his still-sensitive hands to lead his deadened body. The lab workers had laughed; and he had laughed too, until the fog of his re-personalization treatment began to lift, until he began to realize that they were laughing at him. Then he had taught himself, finally, to walk upright like a human being; to at least look like a human being.

Up ahead he saw Orr stop again, and realized that they must have reached the Split already. "Give me some more light up here."

He moved forward to slacken the line between them and shined his lamp on the almost meter - wide crevice that opened across their path. The wardens joined him; Orr gathered himself in the pool of their light and made the jump easily. Jary moved to the lip of the cleft and threw the light of his headlamp down, down; saw its reflection on the oily, gleaming water surface ten meters below. He swayed.

"Don't stand so close to the edge!"

"Just back up, and make the jump."

"Don't think about it - "

"Come on, Jary; we don't have all day!"

Hyacin-Soong struck at his shoulder just as he started forward. With a choked cry of protest he lost his footing, and fell.

The safety line jerked taut, battering him against the tight walls of the cleft. Stunned and giddy, he dangled inside a kaleidoscope of spinning light and blackness. And then, incredulous, he felt the safety line begin to give.... Abruptly it let go, somewhere up above him, and he dropped six meters more to the bottom.

"Jary! Jary - ?"