"Williamson, Jack - 02 - The Humanoid Touch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

THE HUMANOID TOUCH
by Jack Williamson

FOR FRED POHL

Copyright © 1980 by Jack Williamson
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
Published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
383 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10017.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada, Limited.
Printed in the United States of America

ver 1.0
DimJim


1

Humanoids Self-directed robots invented to serve and guard mankind.

Keth loved the suntimes. Thirty days of light and freedom, while the kind sun climbed and paused and sank. He loved the clean smell and cool feel of the wind and the sky's blazing wonder. In the first sharp days before the thaw, there was ice for skates and snow for sleds, but he loved the warmer days more. The excitement of green things shooting up, sunbuds exploding into rich-scented bloom, great golden-sweet melons ripe at last. Best of all, he loved the Sunset festival, with the leaves burning red, and gifts and games, and all he wanted to eat.

The moontimes were not so nice, because the ice storms after Sunset drove everybody back underground. Thirty days in the narrow tunnel places, where he was always cold and just a little hungry, with lessons to learn and no fun but the gym. He hated the dark and the cold and the black humanoids.

"Demon machines!"

Nurse Vesh used them to frighten him when he was slow to mind her. She was a tall, skinny woman with a frowny face and cold, bony hands. Her husband was dead on Malili, where Keth was born, and she blamed the humanoids.

"Bright black machines, shaped like men." Her voice was hushed and ugly when she spoke about them. "Sometimes they pretend to be men. They can see in the dark and they never sleep. They're watching and waiting, up there on the moon. They'll get you, Keth, if you dare disobey me."

She made him fear the moontimes, when Malili either stood alone or sometimes hung beside the red-blazing Dragon, never moving in the cold, black sky. He could feel the cruel minds of the humanoids always fixed upon him, even through the rock and snow above the tunnels. Sometimes in bed he woke sweating and sick from a dream in which they had come down to punish him.

Sometimes he lay awake, wishing for a safer place to hide, or even for a way to stop them. Men must have made them, if they were machines, though he couldn't guess why. Perhaps when he was old enough he could build machines strong enough to fight them.

"They'll never get me," he boasted once. "I'll find a way to beat them."

"Shhh!" Her pale eyes mocked him. "Nobody stops the hu-manoids. Ten trillion machines swarming everywhere but here! They know everything. They can do anything." She chilled him with her bitter, thin-lipped smile. "They'll get you, Keth, if you don't mind me, just like they got your poor, dear mother."

He couldn't remember his mother or Malili or anything before Nurse Vesh had come with his father back from Malili to keep him clean and dole out his quotas and make him mind.

"What did they do—" The look on her face dried up his whisper, and he had to get his breath. "What did they do to my mother?"

"She went looking for a braintree." Nurse Vesh didn't say what a braintree was. "Outside the perimeter. Into jungles full of humanoids and dragon bats and heathen nomads. Never got back. You might ask"-her voice went brittle and high-"ask your father!"

He was afraid to ask his father anything.

"On Malili?" He shook his head, wishing he dared. "Where we came from?"

"And where my Jendre died." Her Jendre had been with his father on Malili. She wore a thin silver bracelet with his name on it. Keth had always wondered how the humanoids killed him, but he couldn't ask her because she cried whenever she remembered him. "Ask your father how." Her voice began to break, and her white face twitched. "Ask where he got that scar!"