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

Huyghens spun the viewer again. He stopped. He switched back and forth and found what he wanted. He muttered in satisfaction: “They did run a tunnel!” Aloud he said, “I’ll worry about witnesses when I have to.”

He pushed aside another cupboard door. Inside it were the odds and ends a man makes use of to repair the things about his house that he never notices until they go wrong. There was an assortment of wires, transistors, bolts, and similar stray items that a man living alone will need. When to his knowledge he’s the only inhabitant of a solar system, he especially needs such things.
“What now?” asked Roane mildly.
“I’m going to try to find out if there’s anybody left alive over there. I’d have checked before if I’d known the colony existed. I can’t prove they’re all dead, but I may prove that somebody’s still alive. It’s barely two weeks’ journey away from here! Odd that two colonies picked spots so near!”
He absorbedly picked over the oddments he’d selected. Roane said vexedly:
“Confound it! How can you check whether somebody’s alive some hundreds of miles away—when you didn’t know he existed half an hour ago?”
Huyghens threw a switch and took down a wall panel, exposing electronic apparatus and circuits behind. He busied himself with it.
“Ever think about hunting for a castaway?” he asked over his shoulder. “There’s a planet with some tens of millions of square miles on it. You know there’s a ship down. You’ve no idea where. You assume the survivors have power—no civilized man will be without power very long, so long as he can smelt metals !—but making a space beacon calls for highprecision measurements and workmanship. It’s not to be improvised. So what will your ship-wrecked civilized man do, to guide a rescue ship to the one or two square miles he occupies among some tens of millions on the planet?”
Roane fretted visibly.
“What?”
“He’s had to go primitive, to begin with,” Roane explained. “He cooks his meat over a fire, and so on. He has to make a strictly primitive signal. It’s all he can do without gauges and micrometers and very special tools. But he can fill all the planet’s atmosphere with a signal that searchers for him can’t miss. You see?”
Roane thought irritably. He shook his head.
“He’ll make,” said Huyghens, “a spark transmitter. He’ll fix its output at the shortest frequency he can contrive—it’ll be somewhere in the five-to-fifty-meter wave-band, but it will tune very broad—and it will be a plainly human signal. He’ll start it broadcasting. Some of those frequencies will go all around the planet under the ionosphere. Any ship that comes in under the radio roof will pick up his signal, get a fix on it, move and get another fix, and then go straight to where the castaway is waiting placidly in a hand-braided hammock, sipping whatever sort of drink he’s improvised out of the local vegetation.”
Roane said grudgingly:
“Now that you mention it, of course—”
“My space phone picks up microwaves,” said Huyghens, “I’m shifting a few elements to make it listen for longer stuff. It won’t be efficient, but it will pick up a distress signal if one’s in the air. I don’t expect it, though.”

He worked. Roane sat still a long time, watching him. Down below, a rhythmic sort of sound arose. It was Sourdough Charley, snoring. He lay on his back with his legs in the air. He’d discovered that he slept cooler that way. Sitka Peter grunted in his sleep. He was dreaming. In the
general room of the station Semper, the eagle, blinked his eyes rapidly and then tucked his head under a gigantic wing and went to sleep. The noises of the Loren Two jungle came through the steel-shuttered windows. The nearer moon—which had passed overhead not long before the ringing of the arrival bell—again came soaring over the eastern horizon. It sped across the sky at the apparent speed of an atmosphere-flier. Overhead, it could be seen to be a jagged irregular mass of rock or metal, plunging blindly about the great planet forever.
Inside the station, Roane said angrily:
“See here, Huyghens! You’ve reason to kill me. Apparently you don’t intend to. You’ve excellent reason to leave that robot colony strictly alone. But you’re preparing to help, if there’s anybody alive to need it. And yet you’re a criminal—and I mean a criminal! There’ve been some ghastly bacteria exported from planets like Loren Two! There’ve been plenty of lives lost in consequence, and you’re risking more! Why do you do it? Why do you do something that could produce monstrous results to other beings?”
Huyghens grunted.
“You’re only assuming there are no sanitary and quarantine precautions taken in my communications. As a matter of fact, there are. They’re taken, all right! As for the rest, you wouldn’t understand.”
“I don’t understand,” snapped Roane, “but that’s no proof I can’t! Why are you a criminal?”
Huyghens painstakingly used a screwdriver inside the wall panel. He delicately lifted out a small electronic assembly. He carefully began to fit in a spaghettied new assembly with larger units.
“I’m cutting my amplification here to hell-and-gone,” he observed, “but I think it’ll do. I’m doing what I’m doing,” he added calmly, “I’m being a criminal because it seems to me befitting what I think I am. Everybody acts according to his own real notion of himself. You’re a conscientious citizen, and a loyal official, and a well-adjusted personality. You consider yourself an intelligent rational animal. But you don’t act that way! You’re reminding me of my need to shoot you or something similar, which a merely rational animal would try to make me forget. You happen, Roane, to be a man. So am I. But I’m aware of it. Therefore, I deliberately do things a merely rational animal wouldn’t, because they’re my notion of what a man who’s more than a rational animal should do.”
He very carefully tightened one small screw after another. Roane said annoyedly:
“Oh. Religion.”
“Self-respect,” corrected Huyghens. “I don’t like robots. They’re too much like rational animals. A robot will do whatever it can that its su
pervisor requires it to do. A merely rational animal will do whatever it can that circumstances require it to do. I wouldn’t like a robot unless it had some idea of what was befitting it and would sptt in my eye if I tried to make it do something else. The bears downstairs, now— They’re no robots! They are loyal and honorable beasts, but they’d turn and tear me to bits if I tried to make them do something against their nature. Faro Nell would fight me and all creation together, if I tried to hann Nugget. It would be unintelligent and unreasonable and irrational. She’d lose out and get killed. But I like her that way! And I’ll fight you and all creation when you make me try to do something against my nature. I’ll be stupid and unreasonable and irrational about it.” Then he grinned over his shoulder. “So will you. Only you don’t realize it.”
He turned back to his task. After a moment he fitted a manual-control knob over a shaft in his haywire assembly.

“What did somebody try to make you do?” asked Roane shrewdly. “What was demanded of you that turned you into a criminal? What are you in revolt against?”
Huyghens threw a switch. He began to turn the knob which controlled the knob of his makeshift-modified receiver.
“Why:’ he said amusedly, “when I was young the people around me tried to make me into a conscientious citizen and a loyal employee and a well-adjusted personality. They tried to make me into a highly intelligent rational animal and nothing more. The difference between us, Roane, is that I found it out. naturally, I rev—”
He stopped short. Faint, crackling, crisp frying sounds came from the speaker of the space phone now modified to receive what once were called short waves.
Huyghens listened. He cocked his head intently. He turned the knob very, very slowly. Then Roane made an arrested gesture, to call attention to something in the sibilant sound. Huyghens nodded. He turned the knob again, with infinitesimal increments.
Out of the background noise came a patterned mutter. As Huyghens shifted the tuning, it grew louder. It reached a volume where it was unmistakable. It was a sequence of sounds like discordant buzzing. There were three half-second buzzings with half-second pauses between. A two-second pause. Three full-second buzzings with half-second pauses between. Another two-second pause and three half-second buzzings, again. Then silence for five seconds. Then the pattern repeated.
“The devil !“ said Huyghens. “That’s a human signal! Mechanically made, too! In fact, it used to be a standard distress-call. It was termed an 5 0 S, though I’ve no idea what that meant. Anyhow, somebody must
have read old-fashioned novels, some time, to know about it. And so someone is still alive over at your licensed, but now smashed-up, robot colony. And they’re asking for help. I’d say they’re likely to need it.”
He looked at Roane.
“The intelligent thing to do is sit back and wait for a ship—either of my friends or yours. A ship can help survivors or castaways much better than we can. A ship can even find them more easily. But maybe time is important to the poor devils! So I’m going to take the bears and see if I can reach them. You can wait here, if you like. What say? Travel on Loren Two isn’t a picnic! I’ll be fighting nearly every foot of the way. There’s plenty of ‘inimical animal life’ here!”
Roane snapped angrily:
“Don’t be a fool! Of course I’m coming! What do you take me for? And two of us should have four times the chance of one!”
Huyghens grinned.
“Not quite. You forget Sitka Pete and Sourdough Charley and Faro Nell. There’ll be five of us if you come, instead of four. And, of course, Nugget has to come—and he’ll be no help—but Semper may make up for him. You won’t quadruple our chances, Roane, but I’ll be glad to have you if you want to be stupid and unreasonable and not at all rational— and come along.”


III