"Jack Williamson - The Humanoids" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

Ironsmith listened to the sergeant, and promised to drop right down. Waiting for him, the
little girl kept a tight grip on the card in her pocket. She stooped restlessly to pic gaudy yellow
blooms from a desert weed outside the fence, and then her huge eyes came uneasily back to the
sergeant.
"Don't you worry, sister." He tried to smooth his drillfield voice. "Because Frank Ironsmith
is a good guy, see? He don't amount to much, and probably never will - all he does is run the
calculating machines in the computing section. But I know he'll try to help you."
"I do need help." She gripped the card tighter. "To get this to Dr. Forester."
"Frank will think of something." The sergeant grinned, trying to break her big-eyed
solemnity. "He's plenty smart, even if he is just a clerk."
She had cocked her head again, staring past him at the lawns and the dark evergreens that
made Starmont a cool oasis, and the sergeant was disturbed by a brief impression that she was
listening for something besides his voice.
"Frank's all right, sister." He went on talking, because the child's odd intentness made him
nervous. "And he knows plenty. Even when he stops at the canteen to drink a beer with us,
he's apt to have a book along. Why, he can even read some old language he says people used to
use back on the first planet."
She was looking back at him, now really listening.
 "That's off somewhere in the stars, you know." He gestured vaguely at the brazen sky. "The
first world, where Frank says all men came from, back in the beginning. One night he showed
me the mother sun." A remembered awe echoed in his voice. "Just another star, in the big
telescope."
For Starmont was not on Earth, nor Jane Carter's language English; even her name is here
translated from less familiar syllables. A hundred centuries had gone since the time of Einstein
and Hiroshima, and the tamed atom had powered ships to scatter the seed of man across many
thousand habitable planets within a hundred light-years of Earth. Countless human cultures,
isolated from one another by the long lifetimes and generations required by the best atomic
ships to cross from star to star, had grown and killed themselves and sprung hardily up to invite
new destruction. Caught in that ruthless repetition of history, this world - not unlike the cradle
planet in chemistry and climate - had fallen with the breakdown of its mother civilization back
almost to barbarism. A dozen centuries of independent progress had brought its people back
about to the level of Earth at the dawn of the atomic age. Technology, however - displaying the
variation more significant than the recurrence of history - was a little farther advanced, with all
its social consequences. A world republic had ended the long eras of nationalistic war, but that
universal state already faced new conflicts in a wider universe. For the local rediscovery of
nuclear fission had set explorers and traders and envoys to voyaging in space again, their crude
atomic craft carrying the virus of science to the peoples of near-by planets still too backward to
have any immunity to the discontents and revolutionary ideologies generated by industrial
revolution. Now, as the slow wave of progress passed its crest on this world of Jane Carter and
the sergeant, the old historical cycle of rise and ruin was preparing to repeat itself again - and
again with variations. Threatened with the inevitable fruit of its own exported know-how, the
democratic republic was already sacrificing democracy, as it armed desperately to face a hostile
new alliance of the totalitarian Triplanet Powers.
"See, sister?" The sergeant grinned encouragingly. "Frank Ironsmith's the one to help you -
and here he comes, right now."
The anxious urchin looked up quickly, to see a slight young man coming down to the gate,
along a shaded gravel path from a little red-shingled building among the evergreens, riding a
rusty bicycle. He waved a genial greeting to the sergeant, and looked at her with gray, friendly
eyes. She smiled at him uncertainly.
A boyish, twenty-six, Ironsmith had a lean, sunburned face and untidy sandy hair. Looking