"C M Kornbluth - The Remorseful" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

They didn't-not after running up and down every spectrum of thought in which they could project. Their
attempt at reception was more successful, and completely horrifying. A few weak, attenuated messages
did come through to the Visitors. They revealed the entities of the planet to be dull, whimpering cravens,
whining evasively, bleating with self-pity. Though there were only two sexes among them, a situation
which leads normally to a rather weak sex drive as such things go in the cosmos, these wispy things
vibrated with libido which it was quite impossible for them to discharge.

The Visitors, thoroughly repelled, were rippling back toward their ship when one signaled: notice and
hide.

The three great black carpets abruptly vanished-that is, each insect found itself a cranny to disappear
into, a pebble or leaf to be on the other side of. Some hope flared that the visit might be productive of a
more pleasant contact than the last with those aimless, chittering cretins.

The thing stumping across the terrain toward them was like and unlike the wave-train cretins. It had their
conformation but was material rather than undulatory in nature-a puzzle that could wait. It appeared to
have no contact with the wave-train life form. They soared and darted about it as it approached, but it
ignored them. It passed once through a group of three who happened to be on the ground in its way.

Tentatively the three Visitors reached out into its mind. The thoughts were comparatively clear and
steady.

When the figure had passed the Visitors chorused: Agreed, and headed back to their ship. There was
nothing there for them. Among other things they had drawn from the figure's mind was the location of a
ruined library; a feeble-minded working party of a million was dispatched to it.

Back at the ship they waited, unhappily ruminating the creature's foreground thoughts: "From Corey's
Gtn you get the charge to tote that bale and lift that barge. That's progress, God damn it. You know
better than that, man. Liberty Unlimited for the Lonely Man, but it be nice to see that Mars ship land. . ."
Agreement: Despite all previous experience it seems that a sentient race is capable of destroying itself.




When the feeble-minded library detail returned and gratefully reunited itself with its parent "lives" they
studied the magnetic tapes it had brought, reading them direct in the cans. They learned the name of the
planet and the technical name for the wave-train entities which had inherited it and which would shortly
be its sole proprietors. The solid life forms, it seemed, had not been totally unaware of them, though there
was some confusion: Far the vaster section of the library denied that they existed at all. But in the cellular
minds of the Visitors there could be no doubt that the creatures described in a neglected few of the
library's lesser works were the ones they had encountered. Everything tallied. Their non-material quality;
their curious reaction to light. And, above all, their dominant personality trait, of remorse, repentance,
furious regret. The technical term that the books gave to them was: ghosts.

The Visitors worked ship, knowing that the taste of this world and its colony would soon be out of what
passed for their collective mouths, rinsed clean by new experiences and better-organized entities.

But they had never left a solar system so gratefully or so fast.