"Jach Williamson - The Ultimate Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

"Nobody, really." He shrugged, with an odd little twist of his golden lips, and I thought he felt sorry for Casey. "If another disaster
did strike the Earth, which isn’t likely at all, it could be repeopled by the colonies."

"So you dug us up for nothing?"

"If you knew what I have done," Pen leaned and reached as if to hug him, but he shrank farther away. "It wasn’t easy! We’ve had
to invent and improvise. We had to test the tissue cells still preserved in the cryostat, and build new equipment in the maternity
lab. A complex system. It had to be tested." He smiled down into Tanya’s beaming devotion. "The tests have turned out well."

"So we are just an experiment?"

"Aren’t you glad to be alive?"

"Maybe," Casey muttered bitterly. "If I can get off the Moon. I don’t want to sit here till I die, waiting for nothing at all?"

Looking uncomfortable, Pen just reached down to lift Tanya up in his arms.

"We were meant for more than that," Casey told him. "I want a life."

"Please, my dear boy, you must try to understand." Patiently, Uncle Pen shook his furry head. "The station is a precious historic
monument, our sole surviving relic of the early Earth and early man. You are part of it. I’m sorry if you take that for a misfortune,


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 "The Ultimate Earth" by Jack Williamson

but there is certainly no place for you on Earth."

2.

Sandor Pen kept coming to the Moon as we grew up, though not so often. He brought tantalizing gifts. Exotic fruits that had to be
eaten before they spoiled. New games and difficult puzzles. Little holo cubes that had held living pictures of us, caught us year
after year as we grew up from babies in the maternity lab. He was always genial and kind, though I thought he came to care less
for us as we grew older.

His main concern was clearly the station itself. He cleared junk and debris out of the deepest tunnels, which had been used for
workshops and storage, and stocked them again with new tools and spare parts that the robots could use to repair themselves
and maintain the station.

Most of his time on the visits was spent in the library and museum with Dian and her holo mother. He studied the old books and
holos and paintings and sculptures, carried them away to be restored, and brought identical copies back to replace them. For a
time he had the digging machines busy again, removing rubble from around the station and grinding it up to make concrete for a
massive new retaining wall that they poured to reinforce the station foundation.

For our twenty-first birthday, he had the robots measure us for space suits like his own. Sleek and mirror-bright, they fitted like
our skins and let us feel at home outside the dome. We wore them down to see one of our old rocket spaceplanes, standing on
the field beside his little slipship. His robots had dug it out of a smashed hangar, and he now had them rebuilding it with new parts
from Earth.

One of the great digging machines had extended a leverlike arm to hold it upright. A robot was replacing a broken landing strut,