Silent Running Read Online Free

orders,” Keenan shrugged. “Can’t disobey a central directive.”
    Lowell slowly began to slice his cantaloupe.
    Suddenly Keenan faced Barker. “Hey, how about blowing the domes all at once—all six of ’em?”
    “Aah, wait a minute.” Barker leafed through the manual, then stopped with “Sorry.” He read aloud, “No more than two forest units may be severed from the spaceship simultaneously. They must be a pair of one odd and one even number in a single tandem cluster.”
    Keenan asked, “How far out do they go before they bomb?”
    “About six miles,” Barker answered. “Wolf asked that before.”
    Keenan turned to Lowell and pointed to his plate.
    “Lowell, you have to eat that stuff in here? It stinks.”
    “You never let up, do you?”
    “Aw, now you’ve hurt his feelings,” Barker jibed.
    “I’d like to know what any of you know about real food.” Lowell faced them all.
    “Lowell, what do you mean, ‘real food’?” Keenan demanded. “Grows out of the dirt. That’s real food, isn’t it?”
    “That’s right,” Lowell agreed heartily. “This happens to be nature’s greatest gift.”
    “To a celibate, maybe,” Barker jibed.
    Keenan laughed. “Maybe he knows something we don’t know.”
    “Lowell, give me a slice of that cantaloupe, hunh?” Barker swung to him. “Thanks, Lowell, a slice.”
    “I’d be delighted to give you a slice of cantaloupe,” Keenan mimicked.
    Lowell reared to his feet. His face was livid with frustration and rage. “Just sit down and shut up.” He glared at Keenan. “Sit d-o-w-n!!! Sit d-o-w-n!!! Shut up! Shut up! Leave me alone all of you and let me eat!”
    “Hey, what’s the big deal?” Keenan demanded. “I can’t see the difference between that and this anyway.”
    “You don’t see the difference! The difference is that I grew it! That’s what the difference is! That I picked it and I fixed it. And it has taste, and it has color, and it has a smell. And it calls back a time when there were flowers all over the Earth, and there were valleys.” Lowell’s face became transfigured. “There were plains of tall green grass that you could lie down in, that you could go to sleep in. There were blue skies and there was fresh air, and there were things growing all over the place, not just in some domed enclosure blasted millions of miles out into space.”
    In a flash of memory, Lowell was sixteen again and riding across a wide prairie dotted with clear lakes. Cattle and wild antelopes grazed there, and when they raised their heads, they could see for a hundred miles. It was like the ocean, with the west wind making waves of the tall grass.
    Buffalo skulls lay in shallow pits and around rocks where the brutes had come to rub their shaggy bodies free of ticks.
    Lowell drew in his breath, remembering.
    They had stopped to camp for the night by a river. His father dismounted to build a fire, while Lowell unsaddled the horses and hobbled them for the night.
    Supper was a thing of beauty, with the clear river slipping by, singing across rocks.
    Afterward they lay around their small fire, stretched out on blankets—staring up at the incredibly close stars, listening to the rattle of the hobbled horses as they grazed, and to the coyotes yipping from hill to hill.
    They stretched out to sleep, with the fire nothing but coals . . . And they slept, with the wind sighing through the cottonwoods—the wind that suddenly became a wild, twisting thing that lifted the live coals into the air and scattered them over the parched grass. Oh God!! The wind wasn’t their fault; it was just a freak twister. It took them hours to beat the flames out with their saddle blankets, but they did it.
    The next morning they rode on under blue skies in the sunshine with the earth sparkling around them. It was wonderful, clean and wholesome, and filled with nature’s good air above them and lush grass under their horses’ beating feet.
    Lowell leaned forward to jab a finger