"Blish, James - Surface Tension" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

Book 3

Surface Tension

Prologue
Dr. Chatvieux took a long time over the microscope, leaving
la Ventura with nothing to do but look at the dead landscape
of Hydrot. Waterscape, he thought, would be a better word.
From space, the new world had shown only one small, trian-
gular continent, set amid endless ocean; and even the con-
tinent was mostly swamp.
The wreck of the seed-ship lay broken squarely across the
one real spur of rock which.Hydrot seemed to possess, which
reared a magnificent twenty-one feet above sea-level. From
this eminence, la Ventura could see forty miles to the horizon
across a flat bed of mud. The red light of the star Tau Ceti,
glinting upon thousands of small lakes, pools, ponds and
puddles, made the watery plain look like a mosaic of onyx
and ruby.
"If I were a religious man," the pilot said suddenly, "I'd
call this a plain case of divine vengeance."
Chatvieiix said: "Hmn?"
"It's as if we'd been struck down foris it hubris? Pride,
arrogance?"
"Hybris," Chatvieux said, looking up at last. "Well, is it?
I don't feel swollen with pride at the moment. Do you?"
."I'm not exactly proud of my piloting," la Ventura ad-
mitted. "But that isn't quite what I mean. I was thinking about

why we came here in the first place. It takes a lot of 'arro-
gance to think that you can scatter men, or at least things
very much like men, all over the face of the galaxy. It takes
even more pride to do the jobto pack up all the equipment
and move from planet to planet and actually make men, make
them suitable for every place you touch."
"I suppose it does," Chatvieux said. "But we're only one of
several hundred seed-ships in this limb of the galaxy, so I
doubt that the gods picked us out as special sinners." He
smiled. "If they had, maybe they'd have left us our ultra-
phone, so the Colonization Council could hear about our
cropper. Besides, Paul, we don't make men. We adapt them
adapt them to Earthlike planets, nothing more than that.
We've sense enoughor humility enough, if you-tike-tfest"
betterto know that we can't adapt men to a planet like Ju-
piter, or to the surface of a sun, like Tau Ceti."
"Anyhow, we're here," la Ventura said grimly. "And we
aren't going to get off. Phil tells me that we don't even have
our germ-cell bank any more, so we can't seed this place in
the usual way. We've been thrown onto a dead world and