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

“Certainly it has been transformed.” Nodding, Uncle Pen
stopped to smile at Tanya as she left her game with the sun
on his back and came to sit crosslegged at his feet.
“Whatever you did was ages ago. Our historians are
convinced that we’ve done more ourselves.”
“You changed the Earth?” Casey was disappointed and a
little doubtful. “How?”
“We removed undersea ledges and widened straits to
reroute the ocean circulation and warm the poles. We
diverted rivers to fill new lakes and bring rain to deserts. We
engineered new life-forms that improved the whole biocosm.”
“But still you owe us something. We put you there.”
“Of course.” Uncle Pen shrugged. “Excavating the station, I
uncovered evidence that the last impact annihilated life on
Earth. The planet had been reseeded sometime before the
lunar impact occurred.”
“We did it.” Casey grinned. “You’re lucky we were here.”
“Your ship?” Pepe had gone to stand at the edge of the
dome, looking down at the monster machines and Uncle Pen’s
7
 The Ultimate Earth
by Jack Williamson


neat little flyer, so different from the rocket spaceplanes we
had seen in the old video holos. “Can it go to other planets?”
“It can.” He nodded. “The planets of other suns.”
Tanya’s eyes went wide, and Pepe asked, “How does it fly
in space with no rocket engines?”
“It doesn’t,” he said. “It’s called a slider. It slides around
space, not through it.”
“To the stars?” Tanya whispered. “You’ve been to other
stars?”
“To the planets of other stars.” He nodded gravely. “I hope
to go again when my work here is finished.”
“Across the light-years?” Casey was awed. “How long does
it take?”
“No time at all.” He smiled at our wonderment. “Not in
slider flight. Outside of space-time, there is no time. But there
are laws of nature, and time plays tricks that may surprise
you. I could fly across a hundred light-years to another star in
an instant of my own time and come back in another instant,
but two hundred years would pass here on Earth while I was
away.”
“I didn’t know.” Tanya’s eyes went wider still. “Your friends
would all be dead.”
“We don’t die.”
She shrank away as if suddenly afraid of him. Pepe opened
his mouth to ask something, and shut it without a word.
He chucked at our startlement. “We’ve engineered