Read Online The Rings of Tantalus by Edmund Cooper - Free Book Online

are a damn good Expendable.”
    Ruth Zonis worked efficiently and enthusiastically. The soil of Tantalus was a dark, heavy loam, rich in organic matter—far richer than the almost worn-out soil of Earth that had had to yield too many crops to support too many people, and was now paying the price for having been boosted for one and a half centuries by chemical fertilisers. She found nitrogen-fixing bacteria in plenty on the roots of a small plant that greatly resembled terrestrial clover. She isolated tiny insects and prepared them for microscopic examination. She even found a worm.
    “Kurt, Lisa! This soil is so rich we could grow anything. We have hit the jackpot. We have come to a biological wonderland.”
    “Then,” retorted Kwango tranquilly, “all we have to do is take the joker out of the pack, and homo sapiens will have another planet to mess up.”
    “The joker being our real or imagined saboteur?”
    “The joker is the joker,” said Kwango.
    Meanwhile, Alexei Pushkin was being brought out of suspended animation. Matthew was the star performer. Matthew with his thermal gloves and his unfailing efficiency. Lieutenant Smith was merely an observer. Medically, there was no need for her presence. She did not even need to supervise. Matthew’s skill was irreproachable.
    But she knew why Conrad really wanted her to be there. There was just a chance that, when he came out of S.A., Alexei Pushkin might make some revealing utterance before he was in full possession of his faculties. Nothing he might say could establish that he was not a saboteur. But he just might say something that would prove his guilt.
    Indira watched Matthew massage expertly with the thermal gloves, bringing heat close to the heart. Alexei’s naked body seemed curiously shrunken. In life, he was a big robust man: in suspended animation, he seemed small, vulnerable, almost unimportant. S.A., thought Indira, was a biological outrage. She knew it was necessary if mankind was to get out to the stars. No one could consciously experience faster-than-light drive and remain sane. Only robots could take the nightmarish stresses and remain rational; but that was because the robots had rigidly programmed logic circuits, and no emotional apparatus. They were programmed to ignore irrelevant data. Human beings could not be so programmed—thank Godl
    “How is Pushkin doing, Matthew?”
    “Temperature is still three degrees Centigrade below independent life-support, Lieutenant. There is intermittent heart response; but the breathing cycle is not yet actuated. Condition normal for this stage. Estimated time for full resuscitation thirty-two minutes, S.E.T. If the situation is designated as an emergency, the time factor can be reduced to twenty-one minutes, but the risk of heart damage will be increased. Do you wish to designate emergency?”
    “No, Matthew. Continue normal resuscitation.”
    “Decision noted. Execution proceeds.”
    While Matthew continued his thermal massage in the heart area, he placed his other thermal glove under the blue and shrunken testicles. They grew larger. The tiny protrusion of the penis expanded. Pushkin had an erection.
    Indira smiled. As a doctor, she knew that frequently men at the point of death had erections. It was part of the biological programme, the indomitable will to survive and procreate. It was new to her that they also had erections when they were coming out of suspended animation. She was amused that the penis had begun to function before the lungs. Nature played strange tricks…
    Twenty-seven minutes later, Alexei Pushkin screamed and tried to sit up. He saw a woman bending over him, and a monstrous metal thing with the word Matthew painted on its chest plate.
    He said: “Tell them I’ll do it! I want to do it!” Then he sank back and closed his eyes.
    Matthew said: “Heart functions well, breathing cycle vigorous, disorientation normal for trauma of emergence.”
    Indira picked up Pushkin’s hand and held