"Leinster, Murray - Exploration Team" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)
should make you a criminal. Nor men subordinating themselves to robots, either!”
“But they are,” said Huyghens mildly. “I’m a crank, of course. But— I live like a man on this planet. I go where I please and do what I please. My helpers, the bears, are my friends. If the robot colony had been a success, would the humans in it have lived like men? Hardly! They’d have to live the way the robots let them! They’d have to stay inside a fence the robots built. They’d have to eat foods that robots could raise, and no others. Why—a man couldn’t move his bed near a window, because if he did the house-tending robots couldn’t work! Robots would serve them—the way the robots determined—but all they’d get out of it would be jobs servicing the robots!”
Roane shook his head.
“As long as men want robot service, they have to take the service that robots can give. If you don’t want those services—”
“I want to decide what I want,” said Huyghens, again mildly, “instead of being limited to choose among what I’m offered. On my home planet we halfway tamed it with dogs and guns. Then we developed the bears, and we finished the job with them. Now there’s population-pressure and the room for bears and dogs—and men—is dwindling. More and more people are being deprived of the power of decision, and being allowed only the power of choice among the things robots allow. The more we depend on robots, the more limited those choices become. We don’t want our children to limit themselves to wanting what robots can provide! We don’t want them shriveling to where they abandon everything robots can’t give—or won’t! We want them to be men—and women. Not damned automatons who live by pushing robot-controls so they can live to push robot-controls. If that’s not subordination to robots—”
“It’s an emotional argument,” protested Roane. “Not everybody feels that way.”
“But I feel that way,” said Huyghens. “And so do a lot of others. This is a big galaxy and it’s apt to contain some surprises. The one sure thing about a robot and a man who depends on them is that they can’t handle the unexpected. There’s going to come a time when we need men who can. So on my home planet, some of us asked for Loren Two, to colonize. It was refused—too dangerous. But men can colonize anywhere if they’re men. So I came here to study the planet. Especially the sphexes. Eventually, we expected to ask for a license again, with proof that we could handle even those beasts. I’m already doing it in a mild way. But the Survey licensed a robot colony—and where is it?”
Roane made a sour face.
“You picked the wrong way to go about it, Huyghens. It was illegal. It is. It was the pioneer spirit, which is admirable enough, but wrongly directed. After all, it was pioneers who left Earth for the stars. But—”
Sourdough raised up on his hind legs and sniffed the air. Huyghens swung his rifle around to be handy. Roane slipped off the safety-catch of his own. Nothing happened.
“In a way:’ said Roane vexedly, “you’re talking about liberty and freedom, which most people think is politics. You say it can be more. In principle, I’ll concede it. But the way you put it, it sounds like a freak religion.”
“It’s self-respect,” corrected Huyghens.
“You may be—”
Faro Nell growled. She bumped Nugget with her nose, to drive him closer to Roane. She snorted at him. She trotted swiftly to where Sitka and Sourdough faced toward the broader, sphex-filled expanse of the Sere Plateau. She took up her position between them.
Huyghens gazed sharply beyond them and then all about.
“This could be bad!” he said softly. “But luckily there’s no wind. Here’s a sort of hill. Come along, Roane!”
He ran ahead, Roane following and Nugget plumping heavily with him. They reached the raised place—actually a mere hillock no more than five or six feet above the surrounding sand, with a distorted cactuslike growth protruding from the ground. Huyghens stared again. He used his binoculars.
“One sphex,” he said curtly. “Just one! And it’s out of all reason for a sphex to be alone! But it’s not rational for them to gather in hundreds of thousands, either!” He wetted his finger and held it up. “No wind at all.”
He used the binoculars again.
“It doesn’t know we’re here,” he added. “It’s moving away. Not another one in sight—” He hesitated, biting his lips. “Look here, Roane! I’d like to kill that one lone sphex and find out something. There’s a fifty per cent chance I could find out something really important. But—I might have to run. if I’m right—” Then he said grimly, “It’ll have to be done quickly. I’m going to ride Faro Nell—for speed. I doubt Sitka or Sourdough would stay behind. But Nugget can’t run fast enough. Will you stay here with him?”
Roane drew in his breath. Then he said calmly:
“You know what you’re doing. Of course.”
“Keep your eyes open. If you see anything, even at a distance, shoot
Roane nodded. He found it peculiarly difficult to speak again. Huyghens went over to the embattled bears. He climbed up on Faro Nell’s back, holding fast by her shaggy fur.
“Let’s go!” he snapped. “That way! Hup!”
The three Kodiaks plunged away at a dead run, Huyghens lurching and swaying on Faro Nell’s back. The sudden rush dislodged Semper from his perch. He flapped wildly and got aloft. Then he followed effortfully, flying low.
It happened very quickly. A Kodiak bear can travel as fast as a race horse on occasion. These three plunged arrow-straight for a spot perhaps half a mile distant, where a blue-and-tawny shape whirled to face them. There was the crash of Huyghens’ weapon from where he rode on Faro Nell’s back—the explosion of the weapon and the bullet was one sound. The somehow unnatural spiky monster leaped and died.
Huyghens jumped down from Faro Nell. He became feverishly busy at something on the ground—where the parti-colored sphex had fallen. Semper banked and whirled and came down to the ground. He watched, with his head on one side.
Roane stared, from a distance. Huyghens was doing something to the dead sphex. The two male bears prowled about. Faro Nell regarded Huyghens with intense curiosity. Back at the hillock, Nugget whimpered a little. Roane patted him roughly. Nugget whimpered more loudly. In the distance, Huyghens straightened up and took three steps toward Faro Nell. He mounted. Sitka turned his head back toward Roane. He seemed to see or sniff something dubious. He reared upward. He made a noise, apparently, because Sourdough ambled to his side. The two great beasts began to trot back. Semper flapped wildly and—lacking wind—lurched crazily in the air. He landed on Huyghens’ shoulder and his talons clung there.
Then Nugget howled hysterically and tried to swarm up Roane, as a cub tries to swarm up the nearest tree in time of danger. Roane collapsed, and the cub upon him—and there was a flash of stinking scaly hide, while the air was filled with the snarling, spitting squeals of a sphex in full leap. The beast had overjumped, aiming at Roane and the cub while both were upright and arriving when they had fallen. It went tumbling.
Roane heard nothing but the fiendish squalling, but in the distance Sitka and Sourdough were coming at rocketship speed. Faro Nell let out a roar and fairly split the air. And then there was a furry cub streaking to-
ward her, bawling, while Roane rolled to his feet and snatched up his gun. He raged through pure instinct. The sphex crouched to pursue the cub and Roane swung his weapon as a club. He was literally too close to shoot— and perhaps the sphex had only seen the fleeing bear-cub. But he swung furiously.
And the sphex whirled. Roane was toppled from his feet. An eighthundred-pound monstrosity straight out of hell—half wildcat and half spitting cobra with hydrophobia and homicidal mania added—such a monstrosity is not to be withstood when in whirling its body strikes one in the chest.
That was when Sitka arrived, bellowing. He stood on his hind legs, emitting roars like thunder, challenging the sphex to battle. He waddled forward. Huyghens arrived, but he could not shoot with Roane in the sphere of an explosive bullet’s destructiveness. Faro Nell raged and snarled, torn between the urge to be sure that Nugget was unharmed, and the frenzied fury of a mother whose offspring has been endangered.
Mounted on Faro Nell, with Semper clinging idiotically to his shoulder, Huyghens watched helplessly as the sphex spat and squalled at Sitka, having only to reach out one claw to let out Roane’s life.
V
They got away from there, though Sitka seemed to want to lift the limp carcass of his victim in his teeth and dash it repeatedly to the ground. He seemed doubly raging because a man—with whom all Kodius Champion’s descendants had an emotional relationship—had been mishandled. But Roane was not grievously hurt. He bounced and swore as the bears raced for the horizon. Huyghens had flung him up on Sourdough’s pack and snapped for him to hold on. He bumped and chattered furiously:
“Dammit, Huyghens! This isn’t right! Sitka got some deep scratches! That horror’s claws may be poisonous!”
But Huyghens snapped, “Hup! Hup!” to the bears, and they continued their race against time. They went on for a good two miles, when Nugget wailed despairingly of his exhaustion and Faro Nell halted firmly to nuzzle him.
“This may be good enough,” said Huyghens. “Considering that there’s no wind and the big mass of beasts is down the plateau and there were only those two around here. Maybe they’re too busy to hold a wake, even! Anyhow—”
He slid to the ground and extracted the antiseptic and swabs.
“Sitka first,” snapped Roane. “I’m all right!”
Huyghens swabbed the big bear’s wounds. They were trivial, because Sitka Pete was an experienced sphex-fighter. Then Roane grudgingly let the curiously-smelling stuff—it reeked of ozon~e—be applied to the slashes on his chest. He held his breath as it stung. Then he said dourly:
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