The Seeds of Time
- Автор: Уиндем Джон Паркс Лукас Бейнон Харрис
- Язык: английский
- Год: Michael Joseph
- ISBN: 0-7181-0362-9
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «The Seeds of Time». Краткое содержание книги:
‘So there is the secret weapon-and if you can make anything of that lot, I’m sure they’ll be pleased to hear about it. Even the dust layer disappointed them by not being explosive. Now they’re all asking one another what the hell such a thing could be remotely expected to do.’
That’s disappointing. It seemed so like a meteor-until it started sizzling,’ said Mr Fontain.
‘One of them has suggested that in a way it may be. A sort of artificial meteor,’ Graham said. ‘That’s a bit too fancy for the rest, though. They feel that if something could be sent across space at all, surely it would be something more intelligible.’
‘It would be exciting if it were,’ Sally said. ‘I mean, it would be such a much more hopeful thing than just another secret weapon-a sort of sign that perhaps one day we shall be able to do it ourselves….
‘Just think how wonderful it might be if we really could do that! Think of all the people who are sick to death of secret weapons, and wars, and cruelties setting out one day in a huge ship for a clean, new planet where we could start again. We’d be able to leave behind all the things that make this poor old world get boggier and boggier. All we’d want is a place where people could live, and work, and build, and be happy. If we could only start again somewhere else, what a lovely, lovely world we might ‘ She stopped suddenly at the sound of a frenzied yapping outside. She jumped up as it changed to a long-drawn howl.
‘That’s Mitty!’ she said. ‘What on earth ?’ The two men followed her out of the house.
‘Mitty! Mitty!’ she called, but there was no sign of the dog, nor sound from it now.
They made round to the left, where the sound had seemed to come from. Sally was the first to see the white patch lying in the grass beside the outhouse wall. She ran towards it, calling; but the patch did not move.
‘Oh, poor Mitty!’ she said, ‘I believe she’s dead!’
She went down on her knees beside the dog’s limp body.
‘She is!’ she said. ‘I wonder what …’ She broke off abruptly and stood up. ‘Oh, something’s stung me! Oh, it hurts!’ She clutched at her leg, tears of anguish suddenly coming into her eyes.
‘What on earth ?’ began her father, looking down at the dog. ‘What are all those things-ants?’
Graham bent down to look.
‘No, they’re not ants. I don’t know what they are.’
He picked one of the little creatures up and put it on the palm of his hand to look at it more closely.
‘Never seen anything like that before,’ he said.
Mr Fontain beside him, peered at it, too.
‘It was a queer-looking little thing, under a quarter of an inch long. Its body seemed to be an almost perfect hemisphere with the flat side below and the round top surface coloured pink, and as shiny as a ladybird’s wing-cases. It was insect-like, except that it stood on only four short legs.
There was no clearly defined head; just two eyes set in the edge of the shiny dome. As they watched it reared up on two of its legs, showing a pale, flat underside, with a mouth set just below the eyes. In its forelegs it seemed to be holding a bit of grass or thin wire.
Graham felt a sudden, searing pain in his hand.
‘Hell’s bells!’ he said, shaking it off. ‘The little brute certainly can sting. I don’t know what they are, but they’re nasty things to have around. Got a spray handy?’
‘There’s one in the scullery,’ Mr Fontain told him. He turned his attention to his daughter. ‘Better?’ he enquired.
‘Hurts like hell,’ Sally said, between her teeth.
‘Just hang on a minute till we’ve dealt with this, then we’ll have a look at it,’ he told her.
Graham hurried back with the spray in his hand. He cast around and discovered several hundreds of the little pink objects crawling towards the wall of the outhouse. He pumped a cloud of insecticide over them and watched while they slowed, waved feeble legs, and then lay still. He sprayed the locality a little more, to make sure.
‘That ought to fix ‘em,’ he said. ‘Nasty, vicious little brutes. Never seen anything quite like them-I wonder what on earth they were?’
Survival
At the spaceport bus trundled unhurriedly over the mile or more of open field that separated the terminal buildings from the embarkation hoist, Mrs Feltham stared intently forward across the receding row of shoulders in front of her. The ship stood up on the plain like an isolated silver spire. Near its bow she could see the intense blue light which proclaimed it all but ready to take off. Among and around the great tailfins, dwarf vehicles and little dots of men moved in a fuss of final preparations. Mrs Feltham glared at the scene, at this moment loathing it, and all the inventions of men, with a hard, hopeless hatred.
Presently she withdrew her gaze from the distance and focussed it on the back of her son-in-law’s head, a yard in front of her. She hated him, too.
She turned, darting a swift glance at the face of her daughter in the seat beside her. Alice looked pale; her lips were firmly set; her eyes fixed straight ahead.
Mrs Feltham hesitated. Her glance returned to the spaceship.
She decided on one last effort. Under cover of the bus noise she said:
‘Alice, darling, it’s not too late, even now, you know.’
The girl did not look at her. There was no sign that she had heard, save that her lips compressed a little more firmly.
Then they parted.
‘Mother, please!’ she said.
But Mrs Feltham, once started, had to go on.
‘It’s for your own sake, darling. All you have to do is to say you’ve changed your mind.’
The girl held a protesting silence.
‘Nobody would blame you,’ Mrs Feltham persisted.
‘They’d not think a bit worse of you. After all. everybody knows that Mars is no place for ‘
‘Mother, please stop it,’ interrupted the girl. The sharpness of her tone took Mrs Feltham aback for a moment. She hesitated. But time was growing too short to allow herself the luxury of offended dignity. She went on:
‘You’re not used to the sort of life you’ll have to live there, darling. Absolutely primitive. No kind of life for any woman. After all, dear, it is only a five-year appointment for David. I’m sure if he really loves you he’d rather know that you are safe here and waiting ‘
The girl said, harshly:
‘We’ve been over all this before, Mother. I tell you it’s no good. I’m not a child. I’ve thought it out, and I’ve made up my mind.’
Mrs Feltham sat silent for some moments. The bus swayed on across the field, and the rocketship seemed to tower further into the sky.
‘If you had a child of your own ‘ she said, half to herself.
‘-Well, I expect some day you will. Then you will begin to understand….’
‘I think it’s you who don’t understand,’ Alice said. ‘This is hard enough, anyway. You’re only making it harder for me.’
‘My darling, I love you. I gave birth to you. I’ve watched over you always and I know you. I know this can’t be the kind of life for you. If you were a hard, hoydenish kind of girl, well, perhaps-but you aren’t, darling. You know quite well you aren’t.’
‘Perhaps you don’t know me quite as well as you imagine you do, Mother.’
Mrs Feltham shook her head. She kept her eyes averted, boring jealously into the back of her son-in-law’s head.
‘He’s taken you right away from me,’ she said dully. That’s not true, Mother. It’s-well, I’m no longer a child. I’m a woman with a life of my own to live.’