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:
‘All right then,’ Duncan shouted inside his helmet. ‘But you’ll go up with it, damn you!’ Which was, of course, nonsense since he had no intention whatever of destroying either the dome or himself.
He had never learnt to tell what went on behind that silly face-she might be coldly determined, or she might not. If’ it had been a matter of a switch which she must press to destroy the place he might have risked her nerve failing her. But this way, it would be he who operated the switch, just as soon as he should make a hole to let the air out. Once more he retreated to anchor himself on the apron. There must be some way round, some way of getting into the dome without letting the pressure down…. He thought hard for some minutes, but if there was such a way, he could not find it-besides, there was no guarantee that she’d not set the explosive off herself if she got scared…. No-there was no way that he could think of. It would have to be the cylinder-crate to Callisto.
He looked up at Callisto, hanging huge in the sky now, with Jupiter smaller, but brighter, beyond. It wasn’t so much the flight, it was the landing there. Perhaps if he were to cram it with all the padding he could find … Later on, he could get the Callisto fellows to ferry him back, and they’d find some way to get into the dome, and Lellie would be a mighty sorry girl-mighty sorry….
Across the levelling there were three cylinders lined up, charged and ready for use. He didn’t mind admitting he was scared of that landing: but, scared or not, if she wouldn’t even turn on her radio to listen to him, that would be his only chance. And delay would do nothing for him but narrow the margin of his air-supply.
He made up his mind, and stepped off the metal apron. A touch on the jets sent him floating across the levelling towards the cylinders. Practise made it an easy thing for him to manoeuvre the nearest one on to the ramp. Another glance at Callisto’s inclination helped to reassure him; at least he would reach it all right. If their beacon there was not switched on to bring him in, he ought to be able to call them on the communication radio in his suit when he got closer.
There was not a lot of padding in the cylinder. He fetched more from the others, and packed the stuff in. It was while he paused to figure out a way of triggering the thing off with himself inside, that he realized he was beginning to feel cold. As he turned the knob up a notch, he glanced down at the meter on his chest-in an instant, he knew…. She had known that he would fit fresh air-bottles and test them; so it had been the battery, or more likely, the circuit, she had tampered with. The voltage was down to a point where the needle barely kicked. The suit must have been losing heat for some time already.
He knew that he would not be able to last long-perhaps not more than a few minutes. After its first stab, the fear abruptly left him, giving way to an impotent fury. She’d tricked him out of his last chance, but, by God, he could make sure she didn’t get away with it. He’d be going, but just one small hole in the dome, and he’d not be going alone….
The cold was creeping into him, it seemed to come lapping at him icily through the suit. He pressed the jet control, and sent himself scudding back towards the dome. The cold was gnawing in at him. His feet and fingers were going first. Only by an immense effort was he able to operate the jet which stopped him by the side of the dome. But it needed one more effort, for he hung there, a yard or so above the ground.
The cutter lay where he had left it, a few feet beyond his reach. He struggled desperately to press the control that would let him down to it, but bis fingers would no longer move. He wept and gasped with the attempt to make them work, and with the anguish of the cold creeping up his arms. Of a sudden, there was an agonizing, searing pain in his chest. It made him cry out. He gasped-and the unheated air rushed into his lungs, and froze them….
In the dome’s living-room Lellie stood waiting. She had seen the spacesuited figure come sweeping across the levelling at an abnormal speed. She understood what it meant. Her explosive device was already disconnected; now she stood alert, with a thick rubber mat in her hand, ready to clap it over any hole that might appear. She waited one minute, two minutes… When five minutes had passed she went to the window. By putting her face close to the pane and looking sideways she was able to see the whole of one spacesuited leg and part of another. They hung there, horizontally, a few feet off the ground. She watched them for several minutes. Their gradual downward drift was barely perceptible.
She left the window, and pushed the mat out of her hand so that it floated away across the room. For a moment or two she stood thinking. Then she went to the bookshelves and pulled out the last volume of the encyclopaedia. She turned the pages, and satisfied herself on the exact status and claims which are connoted by the word ‘widow.’
She found a pad of paper and a pencil. For a minute she hesitated, trying to remember the method she had been taught, then she started to write down figures, and became absorbed in them. At last she lifted her head, and contemplated the result: Ł5,000 per annum for five years, at 6 per cent compound interest, worked out at a nice little sum-quite a small fortune for a Martian.
But then she hesitated again. Very likely a face that was not set for ever in a mould of slightly surprised innocence would have frowned a little at that point, because, of course, there was a deduction that had to be made-a matter of Ł2,360.
Compassion Circuit
BY the time Janet had been five days in hospital she had become converted to the idea of a domestic robot. It had taken her two days to discover that Nurse James was a robot, one day to get over the surprise, and two more to realize what a comfort an attendant robot could be.
The conversion was a relief. Practically every house she visited had a domestic robot; it was the family’s second or third most valuable possession-the women tended to rate it slightly higher than the car; the men, slightly lower. Janet had been perfectly well aware for some time that her friends regarded her as a nitwit or worse for wearing herself out with looking after a house which a robot would be able to keep spick and span with a few hours’ work a day. She had also known that it irritated George to come home each evening to a wife who had tired herself out by unnecessary work. But the prejudice had been firmly set. It was not the die-hard attitude of people who refused to be served by robot waiters, or driven by robot drivers (who, incidentally, were much safer), led by robot shop-guides, or see dresses modelled by robot mannequins. It was simply an uneasiness about them, and being left alone with one-and a disinclination to feel such an uneasiness in her own home.
She herself attributed the feeling largely to the conservatism of her own home which had used no house-robots.
Other people, who had been brought up in homes run by robots, even the primitive types available a generation before, never seemed to have such a feeling at all. It irritated her to know that her husband thought she was afraid of them in a childish way. That, she had explained to George a number of times, was not so, and was not the point, either: what she did dislike was the idea of one intruding upon her personal, domestic life, which was what a house-robot was bound to do.
The robot who was called Nurse James was, then, the first with which she had ever been in close personal contact and she, or it, came as a revelation.
Janet told the doctor of her enlightenment, and he looked relieved. She also told George when he looked in in the afternoon, he was delighted. The two of them conferred before he left the hospital. ‘Excellent,’ said the doctor. ‘To tell you the truth I was afraid we were up against a real neurosis there-and very inconveniently, too. Your wife can never have been strong, and in the last few years she’s worn herself out running the house.’