"Anderson, Poul - Explorationsl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

The screen has been carrying diagrams and cartoons to clarify this physics for the layman. Next leaps forth a view from the observation bridge of a craft already on station, yes, I glimpse an officer whom I recognize, Ludwig Taube, aboard Abdiel. Cameras always record arrivals, to have information should misfortune occur. The scanning is Solward, whence the newcomer is expected. Those who wait will get no advance warning-what signal could outpace light?-but they have no reason to think King is off schedule, give or take a few hours. And, in a corner of the screen, see! The lean shape flashes into sight, into existence within the framework of relativity. It drifts off scene. Tracking, the camera catches and centers it. Stars appear to stream past; Uriel is moving swiftly across their field. Those in a cone ahead of the vessel show a flicker, their light rippled by its thrust drive as it decelerates. Taube's words: "What a hellbat of an intrinsic. I wonder why."

More drawings and narration explain: "-conservation of energy. A ship about to enter super-drive has a certain definite velocity-speed and direction-with respect to any other given object in the universe, including its destination. Crossing space with inertia nullified does not change that velocity, nor do gravitational wells affect it significantly ... as a rule. In ordinary procedure, we try to match this so-called intrinsic to the intrinsic of the target, as closely as feasible, before staring the nonrelativistic part of our journey. Else we might have to spend too much fuel at the far end of the trip, where it can't readily be replaced. Not even the tanks of a fusion engine can carry enough for more than about five thousand kilometers per second of delta-V-that is, total velocity changes, both speedups and slowdowns, added together in the course of a mission ..." Old hat. I noticed acutely how warm and tightly gripping was Daphne's hand.

Switch back to intership transmission. Matt King's blocky face appears, reporting to over-commander Cauldwell aboard Zephon. "Sorry about our excess V. I thought I had our vector well calculated."

"Don't fret," his superior smites. "You're within acceptable limits-barely, but nevertheless within, praise God. Given the uncertainty and variability of parameters, you've done OK."

Jump to a date weeks later, Cauldwell before the board of inquiry on Earth. His features are worn and strained, a tic plagues his mouth, he speaks roughly: "Gentlemen, the guilt is mine. I should have weighed the possibility that the trouble was due to a fault developing within Vriel, worsening till a breakdown must occur."

"But nothing ominous had registered on their gauges en route, had it?" says the presiding officer. I know him. He is a man who, in the fear of the Lord, strives to be just. "We realize how intricate a thing a spaceship is. The least carelessness in maintenance can plant the seed of a terrible surprise."

"Father, forgive me," Cauldwell groans toward the infinite. "I should have thought seriously about that and ordered them straight home."

"Thus canceling their scientific projects: forever, because the stellar system would not have remained long in that particular .state," declares the president. "No, Admiral, your decision was correct. Note well that King did not request an abort, nor any of his men. Our task is to track down whatever technician homeside was negligent, and find out what he did wrong." Pause. "The Pastorate will set his penance."

Narrator: "Seven men aboard Uriel-"

Singly, they go past us. Captain Matthew King, commanding. Lieutenant Commander Valdemar Asklund, navigator and first officer. Lieutenant Jesse Smith, chief engineer. Lieutenant Blaise Policard, second engineer and supervisor of life-support systems. That is all the crew which one of our marvelous wanderers needs, and each has been taught in addition how to assist the scientists. Those are not members of the Corps, though naturally in fine physical shape and sent through basic astronautical training. Nikolai Vissarionovich Kuzmin has planned especially to study nuclear reactions as they gutter out in the bared kernel of the ruptured star, loannes Venizelos gas and radiation dynamics in the nebula, Sugiyama Kito the gravity waves as configurations change. We see their lives, wives, parents, children-

Daphne, and I because of her, saw Valdemar Asklund as if he were alone.

He is a tall young man, lean, blond, narrow-faced, crinkly-eyed, readily smiling. His grays always seem the least bit rumpled, tunic open at the throat and bare of the ribbon to which he is entitled for his role in the daring rescue of Michael. His English carries the rise and fall of surf against the cliffs of that fjord where he was born. He was an indifferent student and barely got accepted into the Corps, but thereafter did brilliantly. Yet he is no spacegoing machine. He loves what remains of Earth's outdoors; he reads widely, with a special fondness for the comedies of Aristophanes, Shakespeare. Holberg, and Yarbro; he paints, plays chess and tennis, can cook a tasty meal or mix a powerful drink (that's a minor point against him, of course), is a genial host and sought-after guest; influenced by his wife, he is deep into the music of Beethoven and has been learning the piano; he has likewise been pondering and quoting old American writings like the Declaration of Independence (good), though he omits the Churchly glosses upon them (bad); he keeps a seemingly unlimited supply of jokes for both stag gatherings and polite company; the more I see, the better I like him. And ... those glimpses of him and Daphne which the filmmakers were able to dig out of this newsfile or that private album ... appearances, frolics, the little possessions which turned their series of apartments into a single home-how happy they made each other!

Return our scene to space. Vessels extrude gang tubes, men cross between and cheerily fraternize, the chaplain aboard Zephon holds a special service for these seven who have gone weeks without hearing the Word from an ordained mouth. But time is fleeting. Captains and scientists confer. The four vessels will proceed in formation to the fringes of the nebula. Thence Uriel will plunge further, to conduct its first set of planned experiments.

The little fleet glides on superdrive to the initial goal. The three which will wait there, making different observations as they free-float in normal state, are sufficiently distant from the core-a quarter light-year-that their hulls and low-intensity MHD fields guard personnel from harm. Fading fast as it expands, today the burst sun gives them hardly more heat and X-rays than they would get in the orbit of Venus; the blast of leptons has already gone past this region, the baryons and ions have not yet reached it, the thin light-haze around is mainly due to excited interstellar gas.

Uriel leaves them. The recorded transmission includes sight of Asklund at his work. He reads off a string of figures, then abruptly grins, his head haloed in stars, waves, calls, "So long and cheerio."

Daphne's nails bit blood out of my hand. I did not stir.

Briefly back under superdrive, Uriel slips close, close to the inferno before reverting to normal1 state, visibility, vulnerability. From protector nozzles gushes a cloud of plasma, which a heightened field wraps around the hull like a faintly shimmering cocoon. This will ward off not only the hurricane of charged particles, but the lethal photons ... most of them. Should the dose aboard approach a safe limit, the ship will flee, faster than light.

These events must be shown in reconstruction. No outside lens, were any that close, could have spied a work of man against the nebular blaze. No message beam, were any receiver that close, could have pierced the wild electricity around. What we see is an impressionistic view, the craft large till it suddenly whirls off, dwindles to sight, vanishes amidst fire. Next, as if given the eyes of angels, we see the greater globe white-hot and still collapsing, the lesser burnt-out and compressed though now ashimmer, whipping in seconds through their orbit. And we see a dot which images Uriel. That dot plunges in.

Closeups: Needles abruptly aswoop across dials, numbers in screens changing too fast to follow, frantic chatter of printout; afterward men, whose resoluteness is a cage for horror.

Narrator: "Without warning, power failed. Engineers Smith and PoHeard could barely squeeze out the ergs to maintain radiation shielding. Nothing could be spared for either thrust or superdrive. The collapse of the MHD field for half an instant would mean death. There was nothing to do but work-find the cause of the trouble and make repairs-while Uriel, helpless, was hauled in like a comet by the gravity of two suns both heavier than Sol itself.

"The orbit had been established beforehand, to swing safely wide of the hot companion, slightly nearer the cold. Nobody had expected to continue in the path for long-certainly not till it almost grazed the sun-clinker. But this is what happened."

A scarlet thread grows behind the dot, marking its track through space. At first, time on the screen is compressed. Uriel had a high intrinsic in the direction of the double, whose mass accelerated it ever more furiously. Nevertheless the ship took days, terrible days to reach apastron.

Later, time is necessarily stretched. For close in, speed increases, increases, increases, dizzily beyond what the simple attraction of matter for matter can wreak. Uriel sweeps around the side of the neutron star opposite the late supernova, a moment in shadow which saves the men, since radiation is forcing itself past their screens in such amounts that every danger signal shrills. Acceleration climbs to better than half a million gees, five hundred kilometers per second per second. Thus the ship departs spaceward in the wink of a quantum, too swiftly for its re-exposure to the starblast to kill. The acceleration tumbles down again; but by then, Uriel is coursing on the heels of light.

Narrator: "Bodies as massive as these two, spinning as fast, generate forces according to the laws of general relativity which act like a kind of negative gravity. That is what seized our unhappy men. They felt no drag, no pressure; they were in free fall throughout, and did not come within the effective tidal action zone. But their intrinsic mounted to more than fifty times what their thrust drive could possibly shed before fuel was exhausted. They were, they are trapped in the speed they have gained."

I meant to write down everything we saw, the pictures taken on board, the forlorn gallantry of men who toiled, suffered, prayed, endured, never really expecting survival nor, maybe, really wanting it. But I cannot.