Frederik Pohl Best of Frederik Pohl

Odnośniki

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

wearing an expression of injury, I noticed that the left sleeve of his
bathrobe was tucked, empty, into a pocket.
"You can't keep them out," said Whitling and spread his hands. "Well, all
right, Mr. Gunnarsen, here it is. You're seeing the whole thing."
I looked carefully around. It was all children-limping children, stumbling
children, pale children, weary children. "But what am I seeing, exactly?" I
asked.
"Why, the Children, Mr. Gunnarsen. The ones we liberated. The ones the
Arcturans captured on Mars."
And then I connected. I remembered about the capture of the colony on
Mars.
Interstellar war is waged at the pace of a snail's crawl, because it takes so
long to go from star to star. The main battles of our war with
Arcturus had been fought no farther from Earth than the surface of Mars, and
the fleet engagement around Orbit Saturn. Still, it had taken eleven years,
first to last, from the surprise attack on the Martian colony to the armistice
signed in Washington.
I remembered seeing a reconstructed tape of that Martian surprise attack. It
was a summer's day-hot-at full noon, ice melted into water. The place was the
colony around the Southern Springs. Out of the small descending sun a ship
appeared.
It was a rocket. It was brilliant gold metal, and it came down with a halo of
gold radiation around its splayed front, like the fleshy protuberance of a
star-nosed mole. It landed with an electrical crackle on the fine-grained
orange sand, and out of it came the Arcturans.
Of course, no one had known they were Arcturans then. They had swung around
the sun in a long anecliptic orbit, watching and studying, and they had
selected the small Martian outpost as the place to strike. In Mars gravity
they were bipeds-two of their ropy limbs were enough to lift them off the
ground-man tall, in golden pressure suits. The colonists came running out to
meet them-and were killed. All of them. All of the adults.
The children, however, had not been killed, not that quickly or that easily,
at least. Some had not been killed at all, and some of those were here in
Donnegan General Hospital.
But not all.
Comprehension beginning to emerge in my small mind, I said, "Then these are
the survivors."
Candace, standing very close to me, said "Most of them, Gunner. The ones that
aren't well enough to be sent back into normal life."
Page 169
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
"And the others?"
"Well, they mostly don't have families-having been killed, you see. So they've
been adopted out into foster homes here in Belport. A hundred and eight of
them-isn't that right, Tom? And now maybe you get some idea of what you're up
against."
There were something like a hundred of the Children in that wing, and I
didn't see all of them. Some of them were not to be seen.
Whitling just told me about but couldn't show me the blood temperature room,
where the very young and very bad cases lived. They had a gnotobiotic
atmosphere, a little rich in oxygen, a little more humid than the ambient air,
plus pressure to help their weak metabolism keep oxygen spread in their parts.
On their right, a little farther along, were the small individual rooms
belonging to the worst cases of all. The contagious. The incurables. The
unfortunates whose very appearance was bad for the others. Whitling was good
enough to open polarizing shutters and let me look in on some of those where
they lay (or writhed or stood like sticks) in permanent solitary. One of the
Arcturan efforts had been transplantation, and the project seemed to have been
directed by a whimsical person. The youngest was about three; the oldest in
the late teens.
They were a disturbing lot, and if I have glossed lightly over what I
felt, it is because what I felt is all too obvious.
Kids in trouble! Of course, those who had been put back into population
weren't put back shocking as these. But they would pull at the heartstrings-
they even pulled at mine-and every time a foster parent or a foster parent's
neighbor or a casual passer-by on the street felt that heartstring tug, he
would feel, too, a single thought: The Arcturans did this.
For after killing the potentially dangerous adults, they had caged the
tractable small ones as valuable research specimens.
And I had hoped to counteract this with five hundred Arcturan pets!
Whitling had been all this time taking me around the wing, and I could hear in
his voice the sound of what I was up against, because he loved and pitied
those kids. "Hi, Terry," he said on the sun deck, bending over a bed
and patting its occupant on his snow-white hair. Terry smiled up at him.
"Can't hear us, of course," said Whitling. "We grafted in new auditory nerves
four weeks ago-I did it myself- but they're not surviving. Third try, too.
And, of course, each attempt is a worse risk than the one before: antibodies."
I said, "He doesn't look more than five years old." Whitling nodded.
"But the attack on the colony was-"
"Oh, I see what you mean," said Whitling. "The Arcturans were, of course,
interested in reproduction too. Ellen-she left us a couple of weeks ago-was
only thirteen, but she'd had six children. Now this is Nancy."
Nancy was perhaps twelve, but her gait and arm coordination were those of a
toddler. She came stumbling in after a ball, stopped, and regarded me with
dislike and suspicion. "Nancy's one of our cures," Whitling said proudly.
He followed my eyes. "Oh, nothing wrong there," he said. "Mars-bred. She
hasn't adjusted to Earth gravity, is all; she isn't slow-the ball's bouncing
too fast. Here's Sam."
Sam was a near-teenager, giggling from his bed as he tried what was obviously
the extremely wearing exercise of lifting his head off the mattress.
A candy-striped practical nurse was counting time for him as he touched chin
to chest, one and two, one and two. He did it five times, then slumped back,
grinning. "Sam's central nervous system was almost gone," Whitling said
fondly. "But we're making progress. Nervous tissue regeneration, though, is
awfully-" I wasn't listening; I was looking at Sam's grin, which showed black
and broken teeth. "Diet deficiency," said Whitling, following my look again.
"All right," I said, "I've seen enough; now I want to get out of here before
they have me changing diapers. I thank you, Commander Whiting. I think
I thank you. Which way is out?"
Page 170
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
IV
I didn't want to go back to Haber's office. I was afraid of what the
conversation might be like. But I had to get a fill-in on what had been
happening with our work, and I had to eat.
So I took Candace back to my room and ordered lunch from room service.
I stood at the thermal window looking out at the city while Candace checked
with the office. I didn't even listen, because Candace knew what I
would want to know; I just watched Belport cycle through an average dull
Monday at my feet. Belport was a radial town, with an urban center-cluster of
the mushroom-shaped buildings that were popular twenty years ago. The hotel we
were in was one, in fact, and from my window I could see three others looming
above and below me, to right and left, and beyond them the cathedral spires of
the apartment condominia of the residential districts. I could see a creeping
serpent of gaily colored cars moving along one of the trafficways, pinpointed
with sparks of our pro-referendum campaign parades. Or one of the
opposition's. From four hundred feet it didn't seem to matter.
"You know, honey," I said as she clicked off the 3-V, "there isn't any sense
to this. I admit the kids are sad cases, and who can resist kids in trouble?
But they don't have one solitary damned thing to do with whether or not the
Arcturans should have a telemetry and tracking station out on the lake." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

zanotowane.pl

doc.pisz.pl

pdf.pisz.pl

angamoss.xlx.pl