"Murray Leinster - Keyhole (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

no ship yet built could carry fuel for a trip to Mars or Venus if it started out from Earth.
With a fueling stop on the Moon, though, the matter was simple. Eight drums of rocket fuel
on the Moon weighed no more than on Earth. A ship itself weighed only one eighth as much on Luna.
So a rocket that took off from Earth with ten drums of fuel could stop at a fuel base on the Moon
and soar away again with two hundred, and sometimes more.
With the Moon as’a fueling base men could conquer the solar system. Without the Moon
mankind was earthbound. Men had to have the Moon!
But Butch’s relatives prevented it. By normal experience there could not be life on an
airless desert with such monstrous extremes of heat and cold as the Moon’s surface experienced.
But there was life there. Butch’s kinfolk did not breathe oxygen. Apparently they ate it in some
mineral combination and it interacted with other minerals in their bodies to yield heat and
energy.
Men thought squids peculiar because their blood stream used copper in place of iron, but
Butch and his kindred seemed to have complex carbon compounds in place of both. They were
intelligent in some fashion, it was clear. They used tools, they chipped stone, and they had long,
needlelike stone crystals which they threw as weapons.
No metals, of course, for lack of fire to smelt them. There couldn’t be fire without air.
But Worden reflectéd that in ancient days some experimenters had melted metals and set wood ablaze
with mirrors concentrating the heat of the sun. With the naked sunlight of the Moon’s surface, not
tempered by air and clouds, Butch’s folk could have metals if they only contrived mirrors and
curved them properly like the mirrors of telescopes on Earth.
Worden had an odd sensation just then. He looked around sharply as if somebody had made a
sudden movement. But the video screen merely displayed a comediain back on Earth, wearing a funny
hat. Everybody looked at the screen.
As Worden watched, the comedian was smothered in a mass of soapsuds and the studio
audience two hundred and thirty thousand miles away squealed and applauded the exquisite humor of
the scene. In the Moon station in Tycho Crater somehow it was less than comical.
Worden got up and shook himself. He went to look again at the screens that showed the
interior of the nursery. Butch was motionless on the absurd cone-shaped stone. His eyes were


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closed. He was simply a furry, pathetic little bundle, stolen from the airless wastes outside to
be bred into a traitor to his own race.
Worden went to his cabin and turned in. Before he slept, though, he reflected that there
was still some hope for Butch. Nobody understood his metabolism. Nobody could guess at what he
ate. Butch might starve to death. If he did he would be lucky. But it was Worden’s job to prevent
it. Butch’s relatives were at war with men. The tractors that crawled away from the station—they
went amazingly fast on the Moon—were watched by big-eyed furry creatures from rock crevices and
from behind the boulders that dotted the lunar landscape. Needle-sharp throwing stones flicked
through emptiness. They splintered on the tractor bodies and on the tractor ports, but sometimes
they jammed or broke a tread and then the tractor had to stop. Somebody had to go out and clear
things or make repairs. And then a storm of throwing stones poured upon him.
A needle-pointed stone, traveling a hundred feet a second, hit just as hard on Luna as it
did on Earth— and it traveled farther. Spacesuits were punctured. Men died. Now tractor treads
were being armored and special repair-suits were under construction, made of hardened steel
plates. Men who reached the Moon in rocket ships were having to wear armor like medieval knights
and men-at-arms! There was a war on. A traitor was needed. And Butch was elected to be that