"Leinster, Murray - Exploration Team" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

Huyghens shrugged again.
“So,” said Roane, “since the secret of getting along with people is that of postponing quarrels—suppose we postponc the question of who kills whom? Frankly, I’m going to send you to prison if I can. Unlawful colonization is very bad business. But I suppose you feel that you have to do something permanent about me. In your place I probably should, too. Shall we declare a truce?”
Huyghens indicated indifference. Roane said vexedly:
“Then I do! I have to! So—”
He pulled his hand out of his pocket and put a pocket blaster on the table. He leaned back, defiantly.
“Keep it,” said Huyghens. “Loren Two isn’t a place where you live long unarmed.” He turned to a cupboard. “Hungry?”
“I could eat,” admitted Roane.

Huyghens pulled out two mealpacks from the cupboard and inserted them in the readier below. He set out plates.
“Now—what happened to the official, licensed, authorized colony here?” asked Roane briskly. “License issued eighteen months ago. There was a landing of colonists with a drone fleet of equipment and supplies. There’ve been four ship-contacts since. There should be several thousand robots being industrious under adequate humad supervision. There should be a hundred-mile-square clearing, planted with food plants for later human arrivals. There should be a landing grid at least half-finished. Obviously there should be a space beacon to guide ships to a landing. There isn’t. There’s no clearing visible from space. That Crete Line ship has been in orbit for three days, trying to find a place to drop me. Her skipper was fuming.. Your beacon is the only one on the planet, and we found it by accident. What happened?”
Huyghens served the food. He said dryly:
“There could be a hundred colonies on this planet without any one knowing of any other. I can only guess about your robots, but I suspect they ran into sphexes.”
Roane paused, with his fork in his hand.
“I read up on this planet, since I was to report on its colony. A sphex is part of the inimical animal life here. Cold-blooded belligerent carnivore, not a lizard but a genus all its own. Hunts in packs. Seven to eight hundred pounds, when adult. Lethally dangerous and simply too numerous to fight. They’re why no license was ever granted to human colonists. Only robots could work here, because they’re machines. What animal attacks machines?”
Huyghens said:
“What machine attacks animals? The sphexes wouldn’t bother robots, of course, but would robots bother the sphexes?”
Roane chewed and swallowed.
“Hold it! I’ll agree that you can’t make a hunting-robot. A machine can discriminate, but it can’t decide. That’s why there’s no danger of a robot revolt. They can’t decide to do something for which they have no instructions. But this colony was planned with full knowledge of what robots can and can’t do. As ‘ground was cleared, it was enclosed in an electric fence which no sphex could touch without frying.”
Huyghens thoughtfully cut his food. After a moment:
‘The landing was in the wintertime,” he observed. “It must have been, because the colony survived a while. And at a guess, the last shiplanding was before thaw. The years are eighteen months long here, you know.”
Roane admitted:
“It was in winter that the landing was made. And the last ship-landing was before spring. The idea was to get mines in operation for material, and to have ground cleared and enclosed in sphex-proof fence before the sphexes came back from the tropics. They winter there, I understand.”
“Did you ever see a sphex?” Huyghens asked. Then added, “No, of course not. But if you took a spitting cobra and crossed it with a wildcat, painted it tan-and-blue and then gave it hydrophobia and homicidal mania at once—why you might have one sphex. But not the race of sphexes. They can climb trees, by the way. A fence wouldn’t stop them.”
“An electrified fence,” said Roane. “Nothing could climb that!”
“No one animal,” Huyghens told him. “But sphexes are a race. The smell of one dead sphex brings others running with blood in their eyes. Leave a dead sphex alone for six hours and you’ve got them around by the dozen. Two days and there are hundreds. Longer, and you’ve got thousands of them! They gather to caterwaul over their dead pal and hunt for whoever or whatever killed him.”
He returned to his meal. A moment later he said:
“No need to wonder what happened to your colony. During the winter the robots burned out a clearing and put up an electrified fence according to the book. Come spring, the sphexes came back. They’re curious, among their other madnesses. A sphex would try to climb the fence just to see what was behind it. He’d be electrocuted. His carcass would bring others, raging because a sphex was dead. Some of them would try to climb the fence—and die. And their corpses would bring others. Presently the fence would break down from the bodies hanging on it, or a bridge of dead beasts’ carcasses would be built across it—and from as far downwind as the scent carried there’d be loping, raging,
scent-crazed sphexes racing to the spot. They’d pour into the clearing through or over the fence, squalling and screeching for something to kill. I think they’d find it.”
Roane ceased to eat. He looked sick.
“There were. . . pictures of sphexes in the data I read. I suppose that would account for.. . everything.”
He tried to lift his fork. He put it down again.
“I can’t eat,” he said abruptly.
Huyghens made no comment. He finished his own meal, scowling. He rose and put the plates into the top of the cleaner. There was a whirring. He took them out of the bottom and put them away.
“Let me see those reports, eh?” he asked dourly. “I’d like to see what sort of a set-up they had—those robots.”

Roane hesitated and then opened his traveling bag. There was a microviewer and reels of films. One entire reel was labeled “Specifications for Construction, Colonial Survey:’ which would contain detailed plans and all requirements of material and workmanship for everything from desks, office, administrative personnel, for use of, to landing grids, heavy-gravity planets, lift-capacity one hundred thousand Earth-tons. But Huyghens found another. He inserted it and spun the control swiftly here and there, pausing only briefly at index frames until he came to the section he wanted. He began to study the information with growing impatience.
“Robots, robots, robots!” he snapped. “Why don’t they leave them where they belong—in cities to do the dirty work, and on airless planets where nothing unexpected ever happens! Robots don’t belong in new colonies! Your colonists depended on them for defense! Dammit, let a man work with robots long enough and he thinks all nature is as limited as they are! This is a plan to set up a controlled environment! On Loren Two! Controlled environment—” He swore, luridly. “Complacent, idiotic, desk-bound half-wits!”
“Robots are all right,” said Roane. “We couldn’t run civilization without them.”
“But you can’t tame a wilderness with ‘em!” snapped Huyghens. “You had a dozen men landed, with fifty assembled robots to start with. There were parts for fifteen hundred more—and I’ll bet anything I’ve got that the ship-contacts landed more still.”
“They did’ admitted Roane.
“I despise ‘em,” growled Huyghens. “I feel about ‘em the way the old Greeks and Romans felt about slaves. They’re for menial work—the sort of work a man will perform for himself, but that he won’t do for another man for pay. Degrading work!”
“Quite aristocratic!” said Roane with a touch of irony. “I take it that robots clean out the bear quarters downstairs.”
“No!” snapped Huyghens. “I do! They’re my friends! They fight for me! They can’t understand the necessity and no robot would do the job right!”
He growled, again. The noises of the night went on outside. Organ tones and hiccupings and the sound of tack hammers and slamming doors. Somewhere there was a singularly exact replica of the discordant squeaking of a rusty pump.
“I’m looking,” said Huyghens at the micro-viewer, “for the record of their mining operations. An open-pit operation wouldn’t mean a thing. But if they had driven a tunnel, and somebody was there supervising the robots when the colony was wiped out, there’s an off-chance he survived a while.”
Roane regarded him with suddenly intent eyes.
“And—”
“Dammit,” snapped Huyghens, “if so I’ll go see! He’d ... they’d have no chance at all, otherwise. Not that the chance is good in any case!”
Roane raised his eyebrows.
“I’m a Colonial Survey officer,” he said. “I’ve told you I’ll send you to prison if I can. You’ve risked the lives of millions of people, maintaining non-quarantined communication with an unlicensed planet. If you did rescue somebody from the ruins of the robot colony, does it occur to you that they’d be witnesses to your unauthorized presence here?”