"Alexei Panshin - Rite Of Passage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Panshin Alexei)

then back into the ducts and down to Engineers, where water and dirt, carbon
dioxide, and germs are removed, and a touch of clean water is added. They kick it
around a little more, and then they blow it back up to the Third Level.
The ducts moved in straight lines, and walking within them you could move
through walls and arrive almost anywhere faster than you could through the halls.
Anybody bigger than I was was too big to squeeze through the grate openings—
there were larger openings for repairmen, but they were kept locked— and all the
other kids I knew were too frightened to follow me, so the shortcut remained my
own private route. They all thought I was foolish to go where I did, and for the sake
of prestige I liked to pretend that they were right, though they weren’t. As long as
you avoided the giant fans you were all right. It was simply that it was people, not
things, that frightened me.
When I got to our corridor, I slipped the grate out and pulled myself up and out
on the floor. I reset the grate and gave a swipe to my hair to teach it to behave and lie
down flat again. I inherit my hair and eyes, my straight nose and my complexion
from my Spanish and Indian ancestors on Daddy’s side of the family, and though I
wear my black hair short, it will misbehave.
“Hi, Daddy,” I said as I came into our apartment. “Am I late?”
The living room was in a real mess. Books and papers were all in piles on the
floor and the furniture was all shoved to one side. Our home ordinarily had a lived-in
look, but this was far worse than usual.
Daddy was sitting in one of the chairs, sorting books. Daddy is Miles Havero. He
is a small man just into middle age with a face that is hard to read, and a very sharp
mind. He is mainly a mathematician, though he sits on the Ship’s Council and has for
years. He and I had lived in this apartment since I left the dormitory when I was nine.
He gave me an inquiring look. “What happened to you?”
“I didn’t mean to be late,” I said.
“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I’m talking about your clothes.”
I looked down. I had on a white shirt and yellow shorts. Across the front of both
were streaks of dust and grime.
The Ship is a place where it is almost impossible to get dirty. The ground in the
quad yards isn’t real dirt-and-grass, for one thing. It’s a cellulose product set in a
milled fiber and plastic base— when a square gets worn they rip it out and put in a
new one, just like in your living room floor. The only place there is dirt in any
quantity is the Third Level, where there isn’t anything else but. A certain amount of
dirt does get carried out of the Third Level and spread and tracked around the Ship.
Eventually it gets sucked into the collecting chutes and blown down to Engineers on
the First Level, where it is used to feed the Convertors to produce heat, light and
power inside the Ship. But you can see that ordinarily there isn’t much opportunity
to get filthy.
I once asked Daddy why they didn’t work out a system to keep the dirt at its only
source— the Third Level— instead of going to the trouble of cleaning the Ship after
it gets dirty. It wouldn’t be hard to do.
He said, “You know what the Ship was built for, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. Everybody knows that. It was built to carry Mudeaters out to settle
the Colonies— I don’t call them that in Daddy’s presence, by the way; though it
may seem surprising, he doesn’t like the word.
Daddy went on to explain. The Mudeaters— Colons, rather— were packed in at
very close quarters. They weren’t clean people— try to convince a peasant to
wash— and people packed in as close as they were are going to sweat and stink