"Gordon Dickson & Harry Harrision - Lifeship Lp Ebook Txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

"Nor are you aboard this lifeship in such mode as I would prefer," she said. "You are eight. The number is not optimum."

Giles stared at her.

"J don't understand the Rayumung," he said.

"The number," repeated the Captain, "is not optimum for Perfection in continuing our voyage to Belben. It would be more optimal if you were one less. Perhaps you will reduce your number by one individual." She pointed to the tank in the back of the lifeship. "The converter could use the additional raw material."

Giles stiffened.

"Murder an arbite, just to suit your idea of Perfection?" he snapped.

"Why not?" The dark, round eyes stared unblinkingly at him. "You use them as slaves, but here in this small ship you have no need for so many slaves. What is one of them compared to the good will of myself, who hold survival of all of you in my hands? Why concern yourself for any of them?"

A shock like the blow of some icy-bladed ax between his shoulder blades robbed Giles of words. It was several seconds before he could get himself under control enough to speak.

"They are arbites!" The buzzing Albenareth words lent themselves to being snarled by the human throat, and Giles heard himself snarling them. "They are arbites, and 1 am an Adelmani An Adelman of a family who have been Adelbom for twenty generations! Put me in the converter, if you think you can, Rayumung. But lay one finger on any of these now under my protection, and I swear to you by the God of my race and the Perfection worshipped by yours that this lifeship will reach no destination at all, and you will die in dishonor, if I have to take the hull plates apart with my bare hands!"

The Captain loomed over him. The wrinkled alien face, expressionless, was close to his.

"I suggested only, not commanded," said the Captain. A rare tone of emotion, of something almost like grim humor, crept into her voice. "But do you really think you could match yourself against me, human?"

She turned away. Giles found he was trembling like a dead leaf in the winter gale of his rage. He stood for a second until the shaking stopped, before turning around. It would not do to have the arbites see him otherwise than in perfect control of himself.

He had let himself react without thinking and the results had nearly been disastrous, to himself as well as to his mission. He should never have lost his temper. True, the destruction of another human being was nowhere near the small thing the Albenareth Captain thought it to be. But theoretically, Giles' duty was more important than every arbite on this boat, and logic dictated that he should have not hesitated to sacrifice one of them if his mission demanded it. Moreover, no doubt there were many of the other Adelbom in the Oca Front who would never have so hesitated. Still, he knew in his innermost self that if he were to face that same suggestion from the Captain all over again, his reaction would be no different.

He was a Steel—one of the ancient and honorable family who still lived and worked with the metal that had given them their wealth and rank—unlike Copper or Comsats or Uti, families who long ago had left the sources of their names to the handling of their arbites. The metal, steel, had lifted man on the first steps of his road to civilization. The Eiffel Tower and the San-Fran Bridge still stood as monuments to the lifting. No one of the Steel sept could in honor stand idly by and see a defenseless arbite abused—let alone killed.

He calmed, inwardly as well as outwardly. There was no question about his duty. He had only to follow his instincts—let live or die who might.

He turned back at last to the arbites with a face that was composed and even smiling a little.

3:17 hours

The panels for the partitions were dry and old like much of the rest of the hfeship parts. Their fabric had torn in Hem's thick fists as the large arbite pulled them from their niches in the floor of the ship. Giles lay on his cot, watching Groce and Esteven painstakingly gluing the torn edges together with an adhesive film extruded by a tool in the small repair kit the Albenareth Engineer had been able to provide. The two aliens were supplied with a permanent in-place screen behind their seats in the control area, that they needed only to loll down and fasten. They had been out of the sight of their human passengers most of the time since they had done so, and for that bit of screening, particularly, Giles was thankful. The less the arbites saw of the aliens, he reasoned, the more likely they would be to live with the Albenareth in harmony. Once their own screens were repaired and in position, he would set a couple of the women to harvesting the fruit of the ib vine- But for the moment, work space aboard was too crowded, with the panels spread out as they were for repair.

He transferred his gaze from his fellow passengers to the ceiling of the craft, with its sections of utilitarian gray metal. A far cry from the comforts of his own interplanetary yacht.... His mind drifted off to large problems, the whole of his mission.

He had saved the warrant, thankfully. Without the warrant, he would have to risk an assassination on a Colony World where the police methods of those there would be unfamiliar. He smiled a little bitterly to himself. Once there had been no need for the Adelbom to kill one another, but Paul Oca had forced the chain of events that now moved to destroy him. If Paul had only been content to be their namesake, their philosopher, who had set them —all the conscientious young men and women of the Adelbom who had formed the Oca Front six years ago—on the road to cleansing and reawakening the human spirit. But some twist in Paul, some instinct to destruction, had pushed him to go one step further to suggest they throw open the doors of the Free Teaching Centers to the arbites, immediately.

"Are you insane, Paul?" Giles had asked. "That's a ridiculous question," said Paul coldly. "Is it?" said Giles. "You have to know that doing it suddenly would cause chaos—people starving in the streets in the long run, all governmental control broken down and production at a halt. Something like that has to be done step by step. Why do you think the world was put under the present social structure by our ancestors? There simply wasn't room enough or production enough to support the population and the power demands of an emerging technology. There wasn't any choice. Everybody realized that. It was time to stop developing civilization—all the wild growth in population and invention—for as long as it was necessary to get the race on a working basis, supporting itself without draining the planet any further. Now we've almost got to the point where the Adelman-arbite differences can be scrapped—and you want to smash everything that's been achieved by bringing in heaven immediately, fifty years ahead of schedule."

"I thought," said Paul—his white, regular features were unmoved from the classic impassivity and coldness of the Adelbom-schooled face—"you adhered to my principles of the Oca Front."

"I adhered, and I adhere," Giles said, "to the principle of what needs to be done. The Oca Front is made up of Adelbom, Paul. Remember that. I won't stand by for one member's ideas if I think they're wrong, any more than you would. Even when that member is you. You started the organization, Paul, but you don't own it. You're just one of a group that wants to work to bring this two-hundred-year-old, unnatural social structure to an end. If you doubt that, check some of the other members for opinions. You'll find they don't like your idea of revolution at this moment any more than I do. It smacks of glory-hunting, wanting to have the skyrockets all go up in your own particular time."

"Glory," said Paul, "hunting?" He made two words of it.

"I said that," said Giles, equally deliberately. Only another Adelbom, looking at and listening to the two tall, lean, levelvoiced young men, would have realized that they were on the verge of a deadly explosion. "I said that and I meant that. As I say, check with others of the Front. You'll find I'm not alone in my opinion."