"George Zebrowski - Brute orbits" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zebrowski George)

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low brightness to reveal an incurving land of mud piled with crates and
building machines. The only finished structures were three silver prefab mess
hall domes in the forward section.
All worth had been ripped from this inner land, and it cried out to have
something put back.
As they looked around at the building machines and crates of prefabricated
housing parts, Harry Howes knew that he was here to stay, with no chance for
parole before his thirty years were up. Polau would never get out.
They had killed the old man, Harry told himself, feeling foolish, as if he
were talking to someone else, so for a while at least something harsh should
he done to him. But when would it end? Would thirty years be just about right,
or would he know in his heart when his punishment was over, when he came to
feel something for the man he had helped to kill, much sooner than thirty
years, and then still have to endure the remaining time?
These were vague thoughts in his brain as he looked at Polau, who would never
really be his friend; it would have been better if they had been friends
before, so their time here might be more bearable. From what had come out in
court, Harry wondered what Polau had needed him for, since lie had burgled
that same shop before, never expecting that the old man would modernize his
14 George Zeeromski
alarm system. They were very different people, Harry thought. His father would
have called Polau a creepтАФa thing that went around looking out for itself, and
did it very well most of the timeтАФexcept when it got caught.
Yevgeny Tasarov liked to think that there was no one like him. Yet he also
liked to believe that he was always on the lookout for his equals. It was not
his fault that they came few and far between, and that recently they had not
come at all. He sometimes wondered whether he was no longer able to recognize
them.
Looking at the humanity around him, watching it haul itself through the vast
changes of the last century and a half, Tasarov had concluded early in life
that it was doing only what it could do, not what it should. That way was
mostly beyond the capacities of concerted action; whenever humankind sought to
agree and act in a large group, a curve of differing opinions appeared, as if
someone had pressed a display button. The curve was always the same, with all
the expected views present as if. they were built-in. They probably were
built-in.
Besides, it was hard to know what should be done with humanity; most were
still content to live with no hindsight, less foresight, and }jt-
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tie self-awareness. The whole species was still on automatic. Maybe it would
never be a breakout species. So he had decided to do what he could do with the
tools of thought and learned craft. He was the one-eyed man in the country of
the blind, but he worried about having only one eye; two would have been
better. Lawful or unlawful mattered little, as long as a project was practical
and profitable, and not overly repellent. The craft made him happy; thought
was hard work, but the reality of waiting pitfalls sharpened his alertness, as
he brought the pleasure of craft to bear against failure.
In the fall of 2051, when he was twenty-five, he looked up at the overcast sky
of upstate New York and knew what was possible, and that he would do it. It