"Williamson,_Jack_-_The_Ultimate_Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

"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 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 ourselves, you see, more than we've engineered the Earth."
Casey turned to look out across the shadowed craters at the huge globe of Earth, the green Americas blazing on the sunlit face, Europe and Africa only a shadow against the dark. He stood there a long time and came slowly back to stand in front of Uncle Pen.
"I'm going down to see the new Earth when I grow up." His face set stubbornly. "No matter what you say."
"Are you growing wings?" Uncle Pen laughed and reached a golden arm to pat him on the head. "If you didn't know, the impact smashed all your old rocket craft to junk."
He drew quickly back.
"Really, my boy, you do belong here." Seeing his hurt, Uncle Pen spoke more gently. "You were cloned for your work here at the station. A job that ought to make you proud."
Casey made an angry swipe across his eyes with the back of his hand and swallowed hard, but he kept his voice even.
"Maybe so. But where's any danger now?"
Uncle Pen had an odd look. He took a long moment to answer.
"We are not aware of any actual threat from another impacting bolide. All the asteroids that used to approach Earth's orbit have been diverted, most of them steered into the Sun."
"So?" Casey's dark chin had a defiant jut. "Why did you want to dig us up?"
"For history." Uncle Pen looked away from us, up at the huge, far-off Earth. "I hope you're try to understand what that means. The resurfaced Earth had lost nearly every trace of our beginning. Historians were trying to prove that we had evolved on some other planet and migrated here. Tycho Station is proof that Earth is the actual mother world. I've found our roots here under the rubble."
"I guess you can be proud of that," Casey said, "but who needs the station now?"
"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, but there is certainly no place for you on Earth."
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*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, fusing it smoothly in place with some process that made no glow of heat. Casey spoke to the robot, but it ignored him. He climbed up to knock on the door. It responded with a brittle computer voice that was only a rattle in our helmets.
"Open up," he told it. "Let us in."
"Admission denied." Its hard machine voice had Pen's accent.
"By what authority?"
"By the authority of Director Sandor Pen, Lunar Research Site."
"Ask the director to let us in."
"Admission denied."