"Raymond Z. Gallun - Dawn of the Demigods Or, People Minus X" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gallun Raymond Z)

and bigger tasks. So, even the fearful ones were caught in the rushing current
of the times.
Ed Dukas was soon on a crowded liner. Because she might need him, he
kept close to his mother. Around them were other colonists -- young graduates
from technical schools, newlyweds and people who were physically young, too,
though they were fresh from the rejuvenation vats. They were the aged, awed by
another lifetime before them.
The liner blasted off. A week later it landed on an asteroid of
middling size. The Dukases were assigned to one of a group of trim cottages
that were not even all alike. Under the great glass roof, which kept in the
synthetic air, the new gardens and fruit trees were already growing. And in
coiled tubes of clear plastic filled with water, circulated green algae from
which almost any kind of basic food could be made.
To Eddie it was a satisfying dip into space that he had so much
anticipated. Amid great heaps of steel and plastic and house parts and atomic
machines to maintain a normal temperature so far from the sun, life went on.
Eddie's mother worked in the office of a shop for robot machines. He worked
too -- when and where he could -- when he was not at school.
There was a little more of peace, for a while anyway. There was the
usual psychological treatment to subdue possible devils of the lunar




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catastrophe which might remain in his mind. There were sports and an
artificial lake to swim in with his companions. However, Ed Dukas was wary of
making deep friendships.
He was then a sullen, overly matured youth of thirteen, earnest about
everything he did -- for he knew that the years ahead were grimly earnest.
Carefully he kept up with the reports in scientific journals: about the laying
of the keel of the first star ship on a minute asteroid with only a number and
no name. Harwell was in charge. The propellant would be pure radiant energy --
the best of them all; energy so concentrated that it would be truly massive
and hurled at the speed of light, which was not remarkable, since it would be
light, far more intense per unit area than the noval explosion of a star!
This was by no means the only major advance that had been accomplished
and was reported. Technological progress was steady in all fields, across the
board, making a solid front. Others of its facets also had a special appeal to
Ed Dukas. Biological science, in its newest interpretations, he knew to be the
most important of these. Now it was no longer just simple rejuvenation --
restoring rusty organs. It was a thing that could start from a single cell, in
warm, sticky fluids, giving rebirth to something that had already been. And it
had a further development -- bringing the same results but more swiftly and
easily, and with different, far more rugged flesh. It was frightening and
fascinating. Knowing was like feeling the shadow of a demon or an angel.
****
Ed Dukas and his mother spent four years on their asteroid. Then one
day a letter fluttered in her hand. And she seemed not to know whether to look
happy or terrified. She did not show her son the letter.