"Anderson, Poul - Question and Answer (Planet of no Return)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

QUESTION AND ANSWER
Poul Anderson

[21 feb 2002-scanned, proofed and released for #bookz]

CHAPTER I
Somewhere a relay clicked, and somewhere else a robot muttered to itself. Alarm lights shot through the spectrum into a hot and angry red, flashing and flashing, and a siren began its idiotic hoot.
"Get out of here!"
Three of the techs dropped what they were doing and shoved for a purchase against the nearest wall. The control panel was a yammer of crimson. Their weightless bodies slammed through the siren-raddled air toward the door.
"Come back here, you-!" They were gone before Kemal Gummus-lugil's roar was finished. He spat after them and grabbed a hand ring and pushed himself toward the panel.
Radiation, radiation, radiation, screamed the siren. Radiation enough to blaze through all shielding and come out with a fury that ionized the engine-room air and turned the alarm system crazy. But the effects were cumulative-Gummus-lugil got close enough to the meters to read them. The intensity was mounting, but he could stand half an hour of it without danger.
Why had they saddled him with a bunch of thumbfingered morons so superstitious about gamma rays that they fled when the converter gave them a hard look?
He extended his arms before him, stopping his free-fall speed with fingertips and triceps. Reaching out for the manual cut-off, he slapped it down with a clank. Somehow the automatic safeties had failed to operate, and the nuclear fires in the converter were turning it into a small sun-but hell dammit, a man could still stop the thing!
Other relays went to work. Baffle plates shot, home, cutting off the fuel supply. The converter's power output was shunted to the generators, building up the damper fields which should stop the reaction-
And didn't!
It took seconds for Gummus-lugil to realize that fact. Around him, within him, the air was full of death; to an eye sensitive in the hard frequencies, his lungs must have glowed; but now the intensity should be dropping, the nuclei slowed in fighting the damper field till their speed dropped below resonance, and he could stop to find out what was wrong. He pulled his way along the giant panel toward the meters for the automatic safeties, and felt sweat prickling under his arms.
He and his crew had been testing the newly installed converter, nothing more. Something could have been wrong with one or another of the parts; but the immense complex of interlocking controls which was the engine's governor should have been self-regulating, foolproof, and-
The siren began hooting still louder.
Gummus-lugil felt his whole body grow wet. The fuel supply had been cut off, yes, but the reaction hadn't been stopped. No damper fields! Behind the casing, all the fires of hell were burning themselves out. It would take hours before that was done, and everybody who stayed on the ship would be a dead man.
For an instant he hung there, aware of the endless falling sensation of weightlessness, aware of the noise and the vicious red lights. If they abandoned the ship in her orbit, she would be hot for days to come and the converter would be ruined. He had to flush the thing-now!
Behind him, the shielded bulkheads closed, and the ventilation system stopped its steady whirr. The ship's robomonitors would not let poison spread too swiftly through her entire body. They, at least, were still functioning. But they didn't care about him, and radiation was eating at his flesh.
He bit his teeth together and got to work, The emergency manuals still seemed okay. He spoke into his throat mike: "Gummus-lugil to bridge. I'm going to flush this damned thing. That means the outside hull will be hot for a few hours. Anybody out there?"
"No." The supervisor's voice sounded small and scared. "We're all standing by the lifeboat locks. Don't you think we should just abandon ship and let her burn herself out?"
"And ruin a billion solars' worth of engine? No, thanks! Just stay where you are, you'll be okay." Even in this moment, the engineer snorted. He began turning the main flushing wheel, bracing his feet against his body's tendency to rotate the other way.
The auxiliaries were purely mechanical and hydraulic-for which praises be to the designers, now when all electronic equipment seemed to have gone mad. Gummus-lugil grunted, feeling the effort in his muscles. A series of ports opened. The rage of more-than-incandescent gases spilled out into space, a brief flame against darkness and then nothing the human eye could see.
Slowly, the red lights dulled to yellow and the siren moderated its voice. The radioactivity in the engine room was falling off already. Gummus-lugil decided that he'd not had a harmful dose, though the doctors would probably order him a couple of months off the job.
He went through the special safety exit; in the chamber beyond, he shucked his clothes and gave them to the robot. Beyond that, there were three successive decontamination rooms; it took half an hour before a Geiger proclaimed him fit for human society. He slipped on the coverall which another robot handed him and made his way to the bridge.
The supervisor shrank from him, just a trifle, as he entered. "All right," said Gummus-lugil sarcastically. "I know I'm a little radioactive yet. I know I should go ringing a bell and crying, 'Unclean! Unclean!' But right now I want to make a call to Earth."
"Huh ... oh, yes, yes. Of course." The supervisor scurried through the air toward the com-desk. "Where to?"
"Lagrange Institute head office."
"What ... went wrong? Do you know?"
"Everything. More than could possibly happen by chance. If I hadn't been the only man aboard with the brains of an oyster, the ship would've been abandoned and the converter ruined."
"You don't mean-"
Gummus-lugil raised his fingers and ticked them off one by one: " S, A, B, O, T, A, G, E spells 'sabotage.' And I want to get the bastard that did it and hang him with his own guts."

CHAPTER II
John Lorenzen was looking out of his hotel window when the call came. He was on the 58th floor, and the sheer drop down made him feel a little dizzy. They didn't build that high on Luna.
Below him, above him, around him, the city was like a jungle, airy flex-bridges looping from one slim tower to the next; and it glowed and burned with light, further out than he could see, over the curve of the world. The white and gold and red and royal blue illumination wasn't continuous; here and there a wide patch of black showed a park, with a fountain of fire or glowing water in the middle of its night; but the lights reached for many kilometers. Quito never slept.
It was near midnight, when a lot of rockets would be taking off. Lorenzen wanted to see the sight; it was famous in the Solar System. He had paid double price for a room facing the wall of the spaceport, not without twinges of conscience, for the Lagrange Institute was footing the bills, but he'd done it. A boyhood on a remote Alaskan farm, a long grind through college-the poor student going through on scholarships and assistantships-and then the years at Luna Observatory, hadn't held anything like this. He wasn't complaining about his life, but it hadn't been anything very spectacular either, and if now he was to go into the great darkness beyond the sun, he ought to see Quito Spaceport at midnight first. He might not have another chance.
The 'phone chimed gently. He started, swearing at his own nervousness. There wasn't anything to be scared of. They wouldn't bite him. But the palms of his hands were wet.
He stepped over and thumbed the switch. "Hello," he said.
A face grew in the screen. It wasn't a particularly memorable face-smooth, plump, snub-nosed, thin gray hair-and the body seemed short and stout. The voice was rather high but not unpleasant, speaking in North American English: "Dr. Lorenzen?"
"Yes. Who ... is this, please?" In Lunopolis, everybody knew everybody else, and trips to Leyport and Ciudad Libre had been rare. Lorenzen wasn't used to this welter of strangers.
And he wasn't used to Earth gravity or changeable weather or the thin cool air of Ecuador. He felt lost.
"Avery. Edward Avery. I'm with the government, but also with the Lagrange Institute-sort of liaison man between the two, and I'll be going along on the expedition as psychomed. Hope I didn't get you out of bed?"
"No ... no, not at all. I'm used to irregular hours. You get that way on Luna."
"And in Quito too-believe me." Avery grinned. "Look, could you come over and see me?"
"I ... well ... now?"
"As good a time as any, if you aren't busy. We can have a few drinks, maybe, and talk a little. I was supposed to approach you anyway, while you were in town."
"Well ... well, yes, sure, I suppose so." Lorenzen felt rushed off his feet. After the leisurely years on the Moon, he couldn't adapt to this pace they had on Earth. He wanted to spit in somebody's eye and tell him they'd go at his, Lorenzen's, speed for a change; but he knew he never would.