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

"Good, fine. Thanks a lot." Avery gave him the address and switched off.
A low rumble murmured through the room. The rockets! Lorenzen hurried back to the window and saw the shielding wall like the edge of the world, black against their light. One, two, three, a dozen metal spears rushing upward on flame and thunder, and the Moon a cool shield high above the city-yes, it was worth seeing.
He dialed for an aircab and slipped a cloak over his thin lounging pajamas. The 'copter appeared in minutes, hovering just beyond his balcony and extending a gangway. He walked in, feeling his cloak grow warm as it sucked power from the 'cast system, and sat down and punched out the address he wanted.
"Dos solarios y cincuenta centos, por favor."
The mechanical voice made him feel embarrassed; he barely stopped himself from apologizing as he put a tenner in the slot. The autopilot gave him his change as the cab swung into the sky.
He was set off at another hotel-apparently Avery didn't live permanently in Quito either-and made his way down the hall to the suite named. "Lorenzen," he said to the door, and it opened for him. He walked into an anteroom, giving his cloak to the robot, and was met by Avery himself.
Yes, the psychman was pretty short. Lorenzen looked down from his own gaunt height as he shook hands. He was only about half Avery's age, he guessed-a tall skinny young man who didn't quite know where to put his feet, unkempt brown hair, gray eyes, blunt homely features with the smooth even tan of Lunar sun-type fluoros.
"Very glad you could come, Dr. Lorenzen." Avery looked guilty and lowered his voice to a whisper. "Afraid I can't offer you that drink right now. We've got another expedition man here-came over on business ... a Martian, you know-"
"Huh?" Lorenzen caught himself just in time. He didn't know if he'd like having a Martian for crewmate, but it was too late now.
They entered the living room. The third man was already seated, and did not rise for them. He was also tall and lean, but with a harshness to his outlines that the tight black clothes of a Noachian Dissenter did not help; his face was all angles; jutting nose and chin, hard black eyes under the close-cropped dark hair.
"Joab Thornton-John Lorenzen-please sit down." Avery lowered himself into a chair. Thornton sat stiffly on the edge of his, obviously disliking the idea of furniture which molded itself to his contours.
"Dr. Thornton is a physicist-radiation and optics-at the University of New Zion," explained Avery. "Dr. Lorenzen is with the observatory at Lunopolis. Both you gentlemen will be going to Lagrange with us, of course. You might as well get acquainted now." He tried to smile.
"Thornton-haven't I heard your name in connection with x-ray photography?" asked Lorenzen. "We've used some of your results to examine the hard spectra of stars, I believe. Very valuable."
"Thank you." The Martian's lips creased upward. "The credit is not to me but to the Lord." There didn't seem to be any answer for that.
"Excuse me." He turned to Avery. "I want to get this over with, and they said you were the expedition's official wailing wall. I've just been looking over the personnel list and checking up on the records. You have one engineer down by the name of Reuben Young. His religion-if you can call it that-is New Christian."
"Ummm ... yes-" Avery dropped his eyes. "I know your sect doesn't get along with his, but-"
"Doesn't get along!" A vein pulsed in Thornton's temple. "The New Christians forced us to migrate to Mars when they were in power. It was they who perverted doctrine till all Reformism was a stink in the nostrils of the people. It was they who engineered our war with Venus." (Not so, thought Lorenzen: part of it had been power rivalry, part of it the work of Terrestrial psychmen who wanted their masters to play Kilkenny cat.) "It is still they who slander us to the rest of the Solar System. It is their fanatics who make it necessary for me to carry a gun here on Earth." He gulped and clenched his fists. When he spoke again, it was quietly:
"I am not an intolerant man. Only the Almighty knows the just from the unjust. You can have as many Jews, Catholics, Moslems, unbelievers, collectivists, Sebastianists, and I know not what else along as you choose. But by joining the expedition I take on myself an obligation: to work with, and perhaps to fight with and save the life of, everyone else aboard. I cannot assume this obligation toward a New Christian.
"If Young goes along, I don't. That's all."
"Well-well-" Avery ran a hand through his hair, an oddly helpless gesture. "Well, I'm sorry you feel that way-"
"Those idiots in the government supposedly running our personnel office for us should have known it from the start."
"You wouldn't consider-"
"I wouldn't. You have two days to inform me that Young has been discharged; thereafter I book passage back to Mars."
Thornton got up. "I'm sorry to be so rude about it," he finished, "but that's the way it is. Speak to the office for me. I'd better be going now." He shook Lorenzen's hand. "Glad to have met you, sir. I hope the next time will be under better conditions. I'd like to ask you about some of that x-ray work."
When he was gone, Avery sighed gustily. "How about that drink? I need one bad myself. What an off-orbit!"
"From the realistic point of view," said Lorenzen cautiously, "he was right. There'd have been murder if those two were on the same ship."
"I suppose so." Avery picked up the chair mike and spoke to the RoomServ. Turning back to his guest: "How that slip-up occurred, I don't know. But it doesn't surprise me. There seems to be a curse on the whole project. Everything's gone wrong. We're a year behind our original schedule, and it's cost almost twice the estimate."
The RoomServ discharged a tray with two whiskies and soda; it landed on the roller table, which came over to the men. Avery picked up his glass and drank thirstily. "Young will have to go," he said. "He's just an engineer, plenty more where he came from; we need a physicist of Thornton's caliber."
"It's strange," said Lorenzen, "that a man so brilliant in his line-he's a top-flight mathematician too, you know-should be a ... Dissenter."
"Not strange." Avery sipped moodily. "The human mind is a weird and tortuous thing. It's perfectly possible to believe in a dozen mutually contradictory things at once. Few people ever really learn how to think at all; those who do, think only with the surface of their minds. The rest is still conditioned reflex and rationalization of a thousand subconscious fears and hates and longings. We're finally getting a science of man-a real science; we're finally learning how a child must be brought up if he is to be truly sane. But it'll take a long time before the results show on any large scale. There is so much insanity left over from all our history, so much built into the very structure of human society."
"Well-" Lorenzen shifted uneasily. "I daresay you're right. But, uh, about the business at hand-you wanted to see me-"
"Just for a drink and a talk," said Avery. "It's my business to get to know every man on the ship better than he knows himself. But that'll also take time."
"You have my psych-tests from when I volunteered for the expedition," said Lorenzen. His face felt hot. "Isn't that enough?"
"No. So far, you're only a set of scores, multidimensional profiles, empirical formulas and numbers. I'd like to know you as a human being, John. I'm not trying to pry. I just want to be friends."
"All right." Lorenzen took a long drink. "Fire away."
"No questions. This isn't an analysis. Just a conversation." Avery sighed again. "Lord, I'll be glad when we get into space! You've no idea what a rat race the whole business has been, right from the first. If our friend Thornton knew all the details, he'd probably conclude it wasn't God's will that man should go to Troas. He might be right, at that. Sometimes I wonder."
"The first expedition got back-"
"That wasn't the Lagrange expedition. That was a shipful of astronomers, simply investigating the stars of the Hercules cluster. They found the Troas-Ilium system in the course of studying the Lagrange suns, and took some data from space-enough to make a planetographic survey seem worthwhile-but they didn't land."
"The first real Lagrange expedition never came back."
There was silence in the room. Outside the broad windows, the night city burned against darkness.
"And we," said Lorenzen finally, "are the second."
"Yes. And everything has been going wrong, I tell you. First the Institute had to spend three years raising the money. Then there were the most fantastic mix-ups in their administration. Then they started building the ship-they couldn't just buy one, everything was committed elsewhere-and there were delays all along the line. This part wasn't available, that part had to be made special. It ran the time of building, and the cost, way over estimate. Then-this is confidential, but you might as well know it-there was sabotage. The main converter went wild on its first test. Only the fact that one man stuck by his post saved it from being a total loss. Even as it was, the repairs and the delay exhausted the Institute's treasury, and there was another pause while they raised more money. It wasn't easy; public apathy toward the whole idea of colonization is growing with each failure.
"They're almost ready now. There are still hitches-this business tonight was just a small sample-but the job is almost done." Avery shook his head. "It's fortunate that the director of the Institute, and Captain Hamilton, and a few others, have been so stubborn about it. Ordinary men would have given up years ago."
"Years ... yes, it's about seven years since the first expedition disappeared, isn't it?" asked Lorenzen.
"Uh-huh. Five years since the Institute started planning this one."
"Who ... who were the saboteurs?"
"Nobody knows. Maybe some fanatic group with its own distorted motives. There are a lot of them, you know. Or maybe ... no, that's too fantastic. I'd rather assume that Lagrange Expedition II has had a run of bad luck, and hope that the run is about over."
"And Expedition I?" asked Lorenzen softly.
"I don't know. Who does? It's one of the things we're supposed to find out."
They were quiet then for a long time. The unspoken thought ran between them: It looks as if somebody or something doesn't want men on Troas, But who, and why, and how?