"Williamson, Jack - 02 - The Humanoid Touch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

Little Chelni Vorn was on the holo again. Her chin was white and shaking. She told the newsmen she had wanted to go with the ship but her mother had kept her on Kai. She blinked at her tears and said she thought the ship was safe, because her father had carried a dragon's egg to make good luck.

"Luck?" Nurse Vesh sniffed. "He's a fool."

That was all anybody knew, till the day Bosun Brong called from the spacedeck. Keth's father was away, but Nurse Vesh let Brong in. A nimble little black-eyed man hi a shaggy winter thermosuit, he seemed to know Nurse Vesh, but she backed away from him, looking pale, when he offered his yellow-gloved hand.

"So you're Shipman Keth?" His face looked dead, but his voice was quick and warm. "Crewman Kyrone's son?"

Keth shook his hand. Inside the thick glove, it felt hard and very strong. Nurse Vesh let him sit in the front room and made him a pot of her bitter tisane. Waiting, Brong pulled off the gloves.

"You know about the starship?" Nurse Vesh poured the boiling tisane and stood staring at his golden hands. Her voice was frightened and high. "What happened to Captain

Vorn?"

Brong's hands were very deft and clever with the mug. Keth waited, wondering if they had met whatever laid the egg, till Brong set down the cup and told them about the flight to the Dragon, and the new planet they had found.

"Kyronia, we called it." His black eyes looked far off, as if he still saw it. "As wild as old Terra must have been before men evolved there. A fine place, maybe, but it nearly killed us all.

"We had three landers. The first one just disappeared. Went behind the planet on its descent and never came back. The second got down on what looked like a nice safe spotЧa wide green plain that looked like grassland but turned out to be a layer of weed that hid a sea of mud. The lander slid down through the weed and never came up.

"We had better luck with the last one. Got down safe on a rocky coast and made three trips back to the starship to ferry our gear and the rest of the crew. Vorn came down on the last flight, with a fusion engine ripped out of the ship to make power for the camp. Then he gathered us together around the landing pad.

"Kyronia, he told us, was our last best chance. With luck and work, we could make it a finer home than Kai. We still had troubles to come, but that was life. Working and risking, making and loving, losing and whining. I liked the way he said it. Standing tall on a granite rock, voice ringing back from the cliffs behind us. We all felt proudЧ

"Till the humanoids came."


3

Rhodomagnetics A tachyonic energy spectrum linked to the second triad of the periodic table of the elements: rhodium, ruthenium, and palladium. Analogous to ferromagnetics, which is linked to the first triad: iron, cobalt, and nickel.

Nothing ever changed Brong's dead brown face, but his hands clenched into golden hammers and his voice went sad and slow when he spoke about the humanoids.

"Our lost lander came back that night. We found it on the pad next morning, loaded with humanoids. They had taken the craft without hurting anybody. They always said they could do no harm to any human being. All they wanted was to help us. If we wanted a home on Kyronia, they would build it for us."

He shook his head and made his hands unfold.

"That's what they did, though Vorn tried to stop them. He begged them to let us do it ourselves. To let us build our own houses and open our own roads and clear our own fields. To use our wits and brawn against a wild planet, fighting to tame it. That's what we'd come for."

The gold hands spread and wearily fell.

"They stopped everything. Because they'd come to care for us, commanded by their crazy Prune Directive. Our own tools were too dangerous for us, they said, and our work was too hard. An axe could cut a man. Lifting a rock could rupture him. One microbe could kill him.

"We had to be protected." Brong sighed and sipped the hot tisane. "In a way, all they did was wonderful. They brought down their tachyonic transport, a hundred times bigger than our starship. They unloaded their great queer machines and built a city for us, there on the cliffs where Vorn had staked out one dirt street for the beginning of our town.

"A beautiful city, in a terrible way." Brong's tone turned sadder. "Crystal towers shining like monster gems. Gardens of great bright blooms like I never saw, not even on Malili. All of it wrapped in a rose-colored cloud.

"A cloud I never understood. It smelled like some queer perfume, so sweet I couldn't stand it, glowing pink at night, so the city was never dark. Somehow shut the planet's rough weather out, so there was never any wind or cold or rain.