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

"I'd rather know about the Leleyo. What are they like?"

"A mutated race. Physically identical to the Kai Nu hi nearly all respects, but immune to bloodrot. Language and culture largely unknown but apparently quite primitive. Shall we talk about your lesson in the civics of the ship?"

He didn't care much for that or math or grammar, but data was nearly always lacking when he asked for anything he really wanted to know. He ran his route and did his lessons, through the endless underground days of a long winter moontime.

In the white excitement of a spring Sunrise day, when he had run all the way back from the gym to get ready for a deckside snow excursion, Nurse Vesh sent him to see his father. Back in that secret room he had seen only twice, Cyra was waiting, too. Both looked serious.

"Sit down, Keth." She made room beside her on the cot. "We've news for you." She was trying to smile. "I hope it won't upset you."

Uneasily, he looked at his father.

"We're leaving, Skipper," his father said. "Returning to the Zone."

Eagerness lifted him. "Am I going?"

His father just frowned.

"We're sorry, Keth." Cyra reached for his hand. "It's a hard thing for us, too. You see, I never found the lost secret I was looking for. One vague hint, in a manuscript of Mansfield's log, but nothing useful. Your father got no support for us here. We hope to do better back in the Zone."

He dropped her hand and kept from crying, too hurt to hear much more of what they said. His father had taken an engineering job they could live on. She would do research at the old Crew station. There was something about weak rhodo sources hi the jungle that she thought could be humanoid probes.

"Our last chance, Keth." He was listening again. "I can't guess what the humanoids are waiting for, but when they do come across from the Dragon we've got to meet them with rhodo weapons. From the hints in the log, we can make a crude detector-a sort of palladium compass to pick up that radiation out of the jungleЧbut nothing that could stop a humanoid." His throat still ached with his own disappointment. "I-I see," he whispered at last. "But what about me?" "We're planning for you, Skipper." His father frowned as ft annoyed by the tears still in his eyes. "I spoke to Nurse Vesh, but she's going to Northdyke to be with an invalid sister. We must put you in school."

"Can I-can I learn to be a Crewman?" "I don't think so." His father's frown bit deeper. "We don't know when the humanoids may come, or whether there will be a Crew. Even if there is, I'm afraid you wouldn't fit." "Why-why not, sir?" "A Crewman has to be a fighter." "I"-he felt weak inside-"! can learn, sir." "You've been neglected." His father looked hard at him. "Nurse Vesh says you have trouble at the gym. Doc Smart reports that you won't play chess. It appears that you avoid conflict."

"But it's not-not that I'm afraid, sir." He slid off the cot and tried to stand brave and straight. "It's just-just that I don't care about winning games. I don't like to beat people or hurt them. But the humanoids aren't people. I could fight the humanoids."

His father kept frowning. "What's your trouble at the gym?" "I guessЧguess I'm different." Trying to think, he looked up at the proud man in that dun picture. "Maybe because I was born on Malili. I don't understand the other kids, and they don't-" His voice tried to break, and he wished he were as stern and strong as old Kyrondath Kyrone. "They never ask me to play."

"If you can't learn to fightЧ" His father's lips shut hard, and the spider legs of the scar were ragged ridges. "Forget the Crew."

"No!" The hurt made him weak and breathless. "Sir, please! I want so much to be a Crewman."

"We all want things we never get."

His father's tight face twitched, and the tired eyes flashed to the black-bearded man in the picture and back to him. For a long time his father said nothing. His own knees wobbled, and he sat back on the cot beside Cyra.

"You've a lot to learn, Skipper." His father nodded for him to go. "You will be hi school. I've called Topman Taiko at Greenpeak, and you're to go down tomorrow."

Nurse Vesh helped him pack the few things he could bring and found enough quota points to bake him a bag of rocknut cookies to eat on the tubeway. When his father was ready to take him to the station, he reached up to shake her hand. Suddenly she bent down to take him in her arms. Surprised at the sobs that shook her thin, old limbs, he realized that she loved him better than anybody.

Yet he couldn't help crying at the station, when Cyra hugged him and said good-bye. His father's engineering contract was for seven years, nearly as long as his whole life. Nobody had ever told him much about the Zone, except that it was strange and dangerous. If the bloodrot got them, or the humanoids came, he would never see them again.


6

"Dragon's Eggs" Popular name for spheres of polished stone found in the polar ice-caves of Kai, usually buried in circular arrays, perhaps left by ancient visitors from space. Significance unknown.

Greenpeak was a special boarding school for kids with people on Malili. His father warned him at the station that Topman Taiko would be rough on swabbers. He didn't ask what a swabber was, but he felt uneasy.