"Jack Williamson - The Ultimate Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

1.


He loved Uncle Pen. The name he gave us was too hard for
us to say, and we made it Sandor Pen. As early as we could
understand, the robots had told us that we were clones,
created to watch the skies for danger and rescue Earth from
any harm. They had kept us busy with our lessons and our
chores and our workouts in the big centrifuge, but life in our
little burrow left us little else to do. His visits were our best
excitement.
He never told us when he was coming. We used to watch
for him, looking from the high dome on the Tycho rim, down
across the field of Moondust the digging machines had
leveled. Standing huge on the edge of it, they were metal
monsters out of space, casting long black shadows across the
gray waste of rocks and dust and crater pits.
His visit on our seventh birthday was a wonderful surprise.
Tanya saw him landing and called us up to the dome. His ship
was a bright teardrop, shining in the black shadow of a
gigantic metal insect. He jumped out of it in a sleek silvery
suit that fitted like his skin. We waited inside the airlock to
watch him peel it off. He was a small lean man, who looked
graceful as a girl but still very strong. Even his body was
exciting to see, though Dian ran and hid because he looked so
strange.
Naked, his body had a light tan that darkened in the sunlit
dome and faded fast when he went below. His face was a
narrow heart-shape, his golden eyes enormous. Instead of
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 The Ultimate Earth
by Jack Williamson


hair like ours, his head was capped with sleek, red-brown fur.
He needed no clothing, he told us, because his sex organs
were internal.
He called Dian when he missed her, and she crept back to
share the gifts he had brought from Earth. There were sweet
fruits we had never tasted, strange toys, stranger games that
he had to show us how to play. For Tanya and Dian there
were dolls that sang strange songs in voices we couldnтАЩt
understand and played loud music on tiny instruments we had
never heard.
The best part was just the visit with him in the dome. Pepe
and Casey had eager questions about life on the new Earth.
Were there cities? Wild animals? Alien creatures? Did people