"Niven, Larry - Del Rey Crater" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

One tells of an interschool debating competition. The question: Shall condemned criminals be executed by dismantling, the parts to be reserved for organ transplants? The reader who informed me was horrified: the majority voted yes.
You can watch the future fanning out in three directions. Transplanted organs succeed more often and the patients live longer, but prosthetic devices seem to be improving even faster. You don't need a knee transplant; the artificial version is better. Your artificial heart could survive you.
The third choice isn't generating news, but it's important. Clone and grow your own replacement organs! Rejection wouldn't be a problem. You would have to grow what you need before it's urgent, and if you didn't prepare ... then your need for a new liver is no act of God, but your own damned fault. Now whom shall we break up?
One evening last month, I got a phone call from George Scithers. He followed up with newspaper clippings. India has been disassembling condemned criminals for transplants since 1964.
The practice is informal. Donor has been condemned to death. Method: bullet in the neck. Afterward the doctors can have him. But the executioner shoots badly, so the organs are taken while Donor still lives.
Transplants are usually rejected because the Indian doctors don't bother much with matching types. But, by God, they're fresh. And you can't blame Larry Niven for pointing out the possibilities.
They're doing it in China, too. A photocopied page in my mail tells me how to get a brochure on the subject from Human Rights Watch, Publicity Department. "Discusses evidence demonstrating that China's heavy reliance on executed prisoners as a source of transplant organs entails a wide range of human rights and medical ethics violations."
Organlegging in our own cities is today's news: unwilling donors found bleeding in the streets, kidneys and hearts missing.
Meanwhile, Bill Rotsler's quadruple-bypass operation moved veins from his legs into his heart. No rejection problem. My own knee is healing nicely from an operation that didn't involve scalpels, just a laser to burn out a torn meniscus. The woman undergoing physical therapy on the stationary bike next to me is doing fine as her flesh heals around a fully artificial knee. Stay tuned. We're shaping the future now.
"The Woman in Del Rey Crater"
We were falling back toward the moon. It's always an uneasy sensation, and in a lemmy I felt frail. A lemmy is a spacecraft but a very small one; it won't even reach lunar orbit.
Lawman Bauer-Stanson set the attitude jets popping. The lemmy rolled belly up to give us a view. "There, Hamilton," she said, waving at the bone-white land above our heads. "With the old VERBOTEN sign across it."
It was four T-days past sunrise, and the shadows were long. Del Rey was well off to the side, six kilometers across, almost edge-on and flattening as we fell. There were dots of dulled silver everywhere inside the crater, clustering near the center. A crudely drawn gouge ran straight across the crater's center, deep and blackly shadowed. That line and the circle of rim formed the VERBOTEN sign.
I asked, "Aren't you going to take us across?"
"No." Lawman Bauer-Stanson floated at her ease while choppy moonscape drifted nearer. "I don't like radiation."
"We're shielded."
"Suuure."
The computer rolled us over and started the main motor. The lunie lawman tapped in a few instructions. The computer was doing all the work, but I let her land us before I spoke. She'd put us a good kilometer south of the crater rim.
I said, "Being cautious, are we?"
Bauer-Stanson looked at me over her shoulder. Narrow shoulders, long neck, pointed chin: she had the lunies' look of a Tolkien elf matriarch. Her bubble helmet cramped her long hair. It was black going white, and she wore it in a feathery crest, modified Belt style.
She said, "This is a scary place, Ubersleuth Hamilton. Damn few people come here on purpose."
"I was invited."
"We're lucky you were available. Ubersleuth Hamilton, the shield on a lemmy will stop a solar storm, the wildest solar storm. Thank God for the Shreveshield." The radiation signal pulled at Bauer-Stanson's eyes and mine. No rads were getting through at all. "But Del Rey Crater is way different."
The Earth was a blue-white sickle ten degrees above the horizon. Through either window I could see classic moonscape, craters big and little, and the long rim of Del Rey. Wilderness.
"I'm just asking, but couldn't you have set us down closer to Del Rey? Or else near the processing plant?"
She leaned across me, our helmets brushing. "Look that way, the right edge of the crater. Now lots closer and a bit right. Look for wheel treads and a mound--"
"Ah." A kilometer out from the rim wall: a long low hill of lunar dust and coarser debris with a gaping hole in one end.
"You should know by now, Hamilton. We bury everything. The sky is the enemy here. There's meteors, radiation ... spacecraft, for that matter."
I was watching the mound, expecting some kind of minitractor to pop out.
She caught me looking. "We turned off the waldo tugs when we found the body. They've been off for twenty hours or so. You get to tell us when we can turn them on again. Shall we get to it?" Bauer-Stanson's fingers danced over pressure points on the panel. A whine wound down to profound silence as air was sucked from the cabin.
We were dressed alike in skintight pressure suits under leaded armor, borrowed, that didn't fit well. I felt my belly band squeeze tight as vacuum enclosed us. Bauer-Stanson tapped again, and the roof lifted up and sideways.
We moved back into the cargo bay and positioned ourselves at either end of a device built along the lines of a lunar two-wheeled puffer. We lifted it out of the bay and dropped it over the side.
The Mark Twenty-nine's wheels were toroidal birdcages as tall as my shoulders with little motors on the wheel hubs. In lunar gravity wheels don't have to be sturdy, but a vehicle needs a wide stance because weight won't hold it stable. The thing stood upright even without the kickstands. Low-slung between the wheels, a bulky plastic case and a heavy lock hid the works of Shreve Development's experimental radiation shield, power source, sensor devices, and other secrets, too, no doubt. A bucket seat was bolted to the case, with cameras and more sensing devices behind that.
Bauer-Stanson scrambled after it. She pulled it several feet from the lemmy and turned on the shield.
I'd done spot repairs on the Shreveshield in my own ship, years ago when I was a Belt miner. The little version is a flat plate, twelve feet by twelve feet, with rounded corners and a small secured housing at one corner. Fractal scrollwork covers it in frilly curves of superconductor, growing microscopically fine around the edges. You can bend it, but not far. In my old ship it wrapped around the D-T tank, and the shield effect enclosed everything but the motor. In a police lemmy it wraps the tank twice around.
No Shreveshield could have been fitted into the Mark Twenty-nine puffer.
But a halo had formed around it, very like the nearly imperceptible violet glow around the lemmy itself. I'd never seen that glow before. The rad shield normally doesn't have to fight that hard.
Lawman Bauer-Stanson stood within the glow. She waved me over.
I crossed the space between one shield and the other in two bounces. Vacuum and hard bright stars and alien landscapes and falling don't scare me, but radiation is something else.
I asked, "Lawman, why did we only bring one of these puffers?"
"Ubersleuth Hamilton, there is only one." She sighed. "May I call you Gil?"
I'd been getting tired of this myself. "Sure. Hecate?"
"He-ca-tee ," she said. Three syllables. "Gil, Shreve Development makes active radiation shields. They only make the two kinds, and they're both for spacecraft."
"We use them on Earth, too. Some of the old fusion plants are hotter'n hell. The Shreveshield was big news when I was, oh, eight years old. They used it to make a documentary on South-Central Los Angeles, but what got my attention was the spacecraft."
"Tell me about it. Thirty years ago a solar storm would have us marooned, huddling underground. We couldn't launch ships even as far as Earth."
The big shields had come first, I remembered. They were used to protect cities. There was a Shreveshield on the first tremendous slowboat launched toward Alpha Centauri. The little shields, eight years later, were small enough for three-man ships, and that was enough for me. I lofted out to mine the Belt.
"I hope they got rich," I said.
"Yah. When nobody gets rich, they call that a recession," Hecate said. "They spend some of the money on research. They'd like to build a little man-sized shield. They don't talk about the mistakes, but the Mark Twenty-nine is what they've got now."
"You must be persuasive as hell."
"Yonnie Kotani's my cousin's wife. She let us borrow it. Gil, whatever we learn about this is confidential. You are not to open that lock, ARM or no. Puffer, " she said in fine disgust.