- Strona pocz±tkowa
- Ian Rankin [Jack Harvey 01] Witch Hunt (v4.0) (pdf)
- Ian Rankin [Jack Harvey 02] Bleeding Hearts (v4.0) (pdf)
- Jay Caselberg Jack Stein 3 The Star Tablet v2
- James_Grippando_ _Jack_Swyteck_06_ _When_Darkness_Falls
- F Paul Wilson Repairman Jack 01 Legacies
- Jack vance Tschai 2 Servants of the Wankh
- Jack Ketchum & Lucky McKee Kobieta
- James_Grippando_ _Jack_Swyteck_03_ _Last_to_Die
- Jack Mann Her Ways Are Death
- Higgins Jack Gniazdo zła
- zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- fotoexpress.htw.pl
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
this "Mad Scientist Catalog" that most interested the weapons researchers,
though; they strengthened their stomachs and kept at it, looking for a quick
and easy way to beat the
Dreel.
Tortoi Kai was not a scientist but a historian look-ing in the records for
clues to events carefully culled from the open references and filed away to be
forgot-ten. She was chilled to learn how much of the past had been doctored by
the historical boards appointed by past Councils. The farther back one went,
the worse it got wholesale attempts to change history by simply rewriting it
or editing it to suit one's purpose but even as she worked, restoring the
past, entire staffs were distorting the present.
Kai was a typical historian; though her world was collapsing around her, she
followed minor threads, be-coming fascinated by the major and minor people and
events that, when suddenly revealed, changed what she had been taught. It
started in a thread, a name, encountered from a past 762 years dead; it was
dur-ing the days of the sponge merchants, a dark time for the Com, long before
the discovery of the first nonhu-man race. The farther back she looked in the
"win-dow" encompassing that period, the more times the name appeared.
Everyone knew that humanity had originally evolved on a beautiful blue-white
world called Earth, third planet from a yellow G-type sun. It was a world of
conflicting ideologies, a world of rapidly rising popu-lation and rapidly
diminishing resources, one that pushed out, almost at the last minute, into
space.
The ancient name of Einstein had decreed that none could surpass the speed of
light; his physics held even today, refined and honed to the ultimate degree.
But there were ways to circumvent Einstein's physics by re-moving oneself from
the four-dimensional universe in which they operated. Tell scientists
something's impos-sible and show them the math and nine hundred and
ninety-nine out of a thousand accept the declaration. The other one will
Page 30
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
devote his entire life to figuring out how to beat it. Add to this
Earth's total acceptance of the necessity for outward expansion and you give
that one man the funds and personnel and equipment to let him do it.
Human beings love to break laws, even natural ones.
And break Einstein's law they did bent it, anyway so objects could travel
slower than light yet effec-tively progress at a rate thousands of times
light-speed. Expansion was rapid. There were no
Earth-type plan-ets anywhere nearby, but within five years scouting
expeditions located several toward the core that could be made habitable with
some creative planetary en-gineering. Debris and space junk would provide the
resources.
People carried their ideologies with them; Utopians and dystopians all
attempted to display their superior system on worlds where corrupting
competition did not exist. Cloning, genetic engineering on a planetary scale,
social engineering on scales even greater, all created a series of worlds soon
numbering in the hundreds with the Utopians dominating. Each was sure it had
the perfect system; each was determined to bring perfection to the whole race.
Earth could not maintain control. Depleted, depen-dent on the colonies for her
survival, she held power only through military dominance. But the new colonies
developed their own industries using their own re-sources, then, in secret,
created their own military ma-chines and trained personnel. It was ultimately
easy. Most of the colonies buried their ideological hatchets in a quest for
colonial freedom and joined up first to attack Earth's forces and later Earth
itself. The extent of the damage whole worlds burned away shocked even the
toughest party leaders. But it appeared that in victory they were condemned to
wage war against each other.
When fanatics moved to do just that, though, wiser heads prevailed and the
Com the Council of the
Community of Worlds was created. The great weap-ons were placed in the weapons
locker; the
Council alone controlled and guarded it and any technology that might break
that control was automatically broadcast to the automated factories of the
weapons locker of every Com World's patent registration computer complex, or
destroyed. Research applying to such stored weaponry was placed under an
interdict so absolute that near unanimity of the Council was required to get
at it. Each planet was free to develop its own social system; the Council had
no power there. But a planet could not spread its ways by force to other
worlds. There the Council, through its weapons locker and through the
Com Police, prevailed. The only ideological battles possible were on the
develop-ing worlds of the frontier; the only individuality, the only free
souls, left were those who plied the space-ways to maintain the trade between
worlds, those who served them, and those on the frontiers.
In the course of interstellar exploration, a micro-organism was encountered
that interacted with some otherwise harmless synthetic foods to produce a
hor-rible mutation within the brain; a person's ability to think would slowly
be diminished, until he was re-duced to a mindless vegetable unable even to
feed himself. The only known antidote was a spongelike lifeform native to the
home of the microorganism. It contained an arresting agent that the best
computers and best medical minds had not been able to dupli-cate.
The world was interdicted, of course, guarded by automated sentinels so none
could reach it. All cul-tures of the microorganism were destroyed, and it was
thought the problem had been solved.
However, some of the organism and the sponge from the early re-searches fell
into the hands of the underworld elite on a number of the Com Worlds and
quickly was adopted as a means of furthering the aims of their in-terplanetary
organization. By introducing the disease to a planet's leadership, by letting
some examples of deterioration be made and by possessing the only means of
arresting that decay the sponge they now grew in their own secret labs the
Page 31
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
syndicate came to control more and more of the
Com Worlds.
On the communal, genetically engineered world of New Harmony had lived the
syndicate leader, a man not just born but engineered to rule. His name was
Antor Trelig. Trelig was the perfect conqueror a human being with a great
intellect and in perfect phys-ical condition, but one totally without morals,
scruples, or other inconvenient inhibitions. As the Councillor for New
Harmony, he knew who ran what every-where. Gradually, he and his criminal
syndicate had assumed control of world after world, their aim the eventual
control of a majority of the Council. Com ex-pansion was slowed, so that as
each frontier world be-came "ripe," Trelig's sponge syndicate could wrest
control. Furthermore, the slower the expansion the easier it was to attain a
majority on the Council. Then from his luxurious and well-guarded planetoid,
New Pompeii, the self-styled Emperor of a new Roman Empire had tried to gain
control of
literally every-thing.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]