"Anderson, Poul - Question and Answer (Planet of no Return)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)
CHAPTER III
"-interstellar distances have become almost meaningless with invention of the warp drive-within an enormous range. It does not take appreciably more time and energy to go 100,000 light-years than to go one. As a natural result, once the nearer stars had been visited, explorers from Sol started investigating the most interesting ones in the Galaxy, even though many of these lie very far indeed from home, and temporarily ignoring the millions of intervening but quite ordinary suns. In the 22 years since the first Alpha Centauri expedition, hundreds of stars have been reached; and if the hope of finding Earth-like planets for colonization has so far been blasted, the reward in terms of scientific knowledge has been considerable.
"The first expedition to the Hercules cluster was purely astronomical, the personnel being interested only in the astrophysics of the cluster: a dense group composed of millions of stars belonging to Population II, with a surrounding space singularly clear of dust and gases. But while circling the double star Lagrange, the observers detected a planet and investigated. It turned out to be a double planet, the larger remarkably terrestroid. From its Trojan position, it was named Troas, the smaller companion named Ilium. Lacking facilities for planetfall, the expedition necessarily contented itself with studies from space ... "
Lorenzen put down the pamphlet with a sigh. Almost, he knew it by heart. Spectrographic data on the atmosphere, yes, and the vegetation observed seemed to hold chlorophyll. Calculations of mass and surface gravity. Thermocouples confirming what the maps showed: a world still in the clutch of glaciers, but the equatorial regions cool and bracing, a climate which knew snow and storm but also the flowering of summer. A world where men could perhaps walk unarmored, and build homes and farms and cities, a world where men could possibly grow roots and belong. The seven billion humans jammed into the Solar System were crying for a place to go. And during his lifetime he had seen the slow withering of the dream.
It had been foreseen, of course, but no one had believed it till one ship after another had come trailing home, the dust of stars on her battered hull, to bring the word. In all the Galaxy's swarming myriads of planets, there might be none where men could strike roots.
Life on Earth is such a delicate balance of chemical, physical, and ecological factors, many of them due to sheer geological and evolutionary accident, that the probability of a world where men could live without elaborate artificial aids is lower than one dares think. First you have to find an oxygen atmosphere, the proper range of radiation and temperature, a gravity not too small to let the air escape and not so great as to throw the human body fluid adjustment out of kilter. That alone winnows the worlds like some great machine; you have less than one percent left. And then you have to start on the biology of it. Vegetation nourishing to man, and the domestic animals which can eat it, cannot grow without a gigantic web of other life, most of it microscopic: nitrogen-fixing bacteria, saprophytes, earthworms-and these cannot simply be seeded on a new world, for they in turn are dependent on other life-forms. You have to give them an ecology into which they can fit. A billion years of separate evolution will most likely produce native life which is inedible or sheer poison; what, for instance, are the odds against the duplication of all the vitamins?
Mars and Venus and the Jovian moons had been colonized, yes, but it had been at enormous expense and for special reasons-mining, penal colonies, refugees during two centuries of war and tyranny. But their system of domes and tank food could never support many, however hard you tried. Now when the stars were open, nobody wanted another hell-planet. In money terms-which, ultimately, means in terms of value received for effort expended-it wouldn't pay.
A few worlds might have been colonizable. But they held diseases to which man had no racial immunity whatsoever, which would surely wipe out ninety percent of any colony before serums and vaccines could be developed. (The dying crew of the Magellan, returning from Sinus to radio their tragic message before they plunged their ship into the sun.) Or there were natives, unhuman beings as bright as man; often with their own technologies not too far behind his. They would resist invasion, and the logistics of interstellar conquest were merely ridiculous. Balancing the cost of sending colonists and their equipment (lives, too-scarce material resources, blood, sweat, and tears) and the cost of sending soldiers, against the probable gain (a few million humans given land, and the economics of space travel such that they could ship little of value back to Sol), yielded a figure too far in the red. Conquest was theoretically possible, but a war-exhausted humanity, most of it still living near the starvation level, wasn't that interested in empire.
Wanted: terrestroid planets, habitable but uninhabited, clean of major sicknesses, rich enough to support colonists without help from Sol.
Found: In almost a generation, nothing.
Lorenzen remembered the wave of excitement which had followed the return of the Hercules expedition. He had still been a boy then-that was the year before he got the scholarship to Rio Polytechnic-but he, too, had looked up through a wintry Alaskan night to the cold arrogance of the stars; he had also flung his head back with a laugh.
And the Da Gama had set out and had left Sol behind her. And after two years, men shrugged with a weariness that was dying hope. Murdered by natives or by microbes, gulped down when the earth opened under them, frozen by a sudden blast from the glacial north-who knew? Who cared? You heard little talk nowadays about New Earth; no Utopian schemes for the fresh start man was going to make were being published; more and more, men put their shoulders to the tired old wheel of Earth, resigned to this being their only home and their only hope through all time forever.
"Two swallows do not make a summer ... Statistically inadequate sample ... Statistical certainty that somewhere there must be ... " But funds for more investigations were whittled down in every session of Parliament. More and more of the great star ships swung darkly about Earth while their captains begged for finances. And when the Lagrange Institute dug into its own treasury to buy one of them, it could not be done, there was always a reason. "Sorry, but we want to keep her; as soon as we can raise the money, we want to try an idea of our own ... Sorry, but she's already committed; leaving in two months for a xenological expedition to Tau Ceti ... Sorry, but we're converting her to an interplanetary freighter, that's where the money is ... Sorry." The Henry Hudson had to be built from scratch.
The Egyptians sailed to Punt, and could easily have gone further; with a little development, their ships could have reached the Indies. The Alexandrians built an aeolipile, but there was enough slave labor around so that they had no reason to go on from there and make a steam turbine. The Romans printed their maps, but didn't apply the idea to books. The Arabs developed algebra and then got more interested in theological hairsplitting. Something has always lain within the grasp of man which he just didn't care to take hold of. Society must want something enough for the wish to become an actual need before it gets the thing. The starward wish was dying.
CHAPTER IV
Sol was two billion kilometers behind them, little more than the brightest star in a frosty swarm, when they went into warp. The engines roared, building up toward the potentials beyond which the omega effect set in. There was a wrenching dizziness as the ship and her crew leaped out of normal energy levels; night and confusion while the atoms readjusted in their non-Dirac matrices. Then quiet, and utter blind blackness outside the viewports.
It was like an endless falling through nullity. The ship could not accelerate, could not spin, for there was nothing which she could move in relation to; for the duration of the trip, she was irrelevant to the four-dimensional universe. Weight came back as the inner hull started rotating with respect to the outer, though Lorenzen had already been sick-he never could stand free fall. Then there was nothing to do but settle down for the month or so it would take to reach Lagrange.
And the days passed, swept out by clocks, unmarked by any change-they were only waiting now, doubly held in timelessness. Fifty men, spacers and scientists, fretted out the emptiness of hours and wondered what lay on the other end of the warp.
It was on the fifth day when Lorenzen and Tetsuo Hideki wandered down toward the main lounge. The Manchurian was one of the organic chemists: a small, frail-looking, soft-spoken fellow in loose robes, timed with people and highly competent in his work. Lorenzen thought that Hideki made a barrier against the world out of his test tubes and analyzers, but he rather liked the Asian. I've done pretty much the same myself, haven't I? I get along all right with people, yes, but down underneath I'm afraid of them.
"-but why can't you say that it takes us a month to go to Lagrange? That is the time we measure aboard ship, is it not? It is also the time a Lagrangian or Solarian observer would measure between the moment we entered the warp and the moment we came out."
"Not quite," said Lorenzen. "The math shows that it's meaningless to equate time measured inside the warp with time measured outside. It's not even similar to the time-shift in classical relativity. In the omega-effect equations, the t and t' are two distinct expressions, two different dimensions; they have about the same numerical value, but the conversion factor is not a pure number. The fact that time spent in the warp is about the same no matter how far you go-within a terrifically big radius, up to the point where space curvature become significant-indicates that we don't have a true velocity at all." He shrugged. "I don't pretend to understand the whole theory. Not a dozen men can."
"This is your first interstellar trip, is it not, John?"
"I have never even been off Earth. I believe Captain Hamilton and a couple of engineers are the only men aboard who have flown the star ways before now. It is strange." Hideki's eyes looked scared. "There is much which is strange about this trip. I have never heard of so ill-assorted a crew."
"N-n-no." Lorenzen thought over those he knew anything about. There had already been clashes, which Avery had not succeeded very well in smoothing over. "But the Institute had to take what it could get, I suppose, and there are all too many lunatic opinions left over from the wars and the Interregnum. Political fanatics, racial fanatics, religious fanatics-" His voice trailed off.
"I take it you support the Solar government?"
"Sure. I may not like everything it does, but it's got to compromise with many elements if it's to be democratic, and stamp out many others if it's to survive. It's all that stands between us and a return of anarchy and tyranny."
"You are right," said Hideki. "War is a monster; my people know that." There was a darkness in his eyes. Lorenzen wondered if he was thinking of the Mongku Empire which Mars had shattered, or if his thoughts went still further back, to the lovely lost islands of Japan and the Fourth World War which had sunk them under the sea.
They came to the entrance of the lounge and paused, looking in to see who was there. It was a big, low room, its furniture and drapes and gentle illumination a rest from the impersonal metallic harshness which was most of the ship; but it seemed rather bare. The Institute had not had time or money to decorate it properly. They should have taken time, thought Lorenzen. Men's nerves were worn thin out here between the stars, and they needed murals and a bar and a fireplace full of crackling logs. They needed home.
Avery and Gummus-lugil, the ship's chess fiends, were hunched over a board. Miguel Fernandez of Uruguay, geologist, a small dark lively young man, sat thrumming a guitar; near him was Joab Thornton, reading his Bible-no, it was Milton this time, and there was a curious lost ecstasy on the ascetic features. Lorenzen, who dabbled with art, thought that the Martian had a fascinating set of angles and planes in his face; he'd like to do his portrait sometime.
Gummus-lugil looked up and saw the newcomers. He was a dark, stocky man, his face broad and hook-nosed, his shirt open over a wiry pelt. "Hello, there," he said cheerfully.
"Hello," said Lorenzen. He rather liked the Turk. Gummus-lugil had come up the hard way. It had marked him: he was rude and dogmatic and had no use for literature; but his mind was good. He and Lorenzen had already sat through several watches arguing politics and analytical philosophy and the chances of the Academy team getting the meteor polo pennant next year. "Who's ahead?"
"This bastard, I'm afraid."
Avery reached out and advanced a bishop. "Guard queen," he said. His voice remained almost apologetic.
"Huh? Oh, yes ... yes ... Let's see-" Gummus-lugil swore. "This is going to cost me a knight. Okay, okay." He moved.
Avery avoided the knight, but took a pawn with his rook. "Mate in ... five moves," he said. "Care to resign?"
"Whuzzat?" Feverishly, Gummus-lugil studied the board. Fernandez' fingers rippled down a chord.
"You see, here ... and here ... and then-"
"Goddammit, stop that racket!" snarled Gummus-lugil. "How d'you expect me to concentrate?"
Fernandez flushed angrily. "I have as much right-"
Gummus-lugil showed his teeth. "If you could play, it'd be all right," he snapped. "But go do your caterwauling somewhere else, sonny boy."
"Hey, there, Kemal, take it easy." Avery looked alarmed.
Surprisingly, Thornton joined in on the engineer's side. "This should be a place for peace and quiet," he clipped. "Why don't you go play in your bunkroom, Senor Fernandez?"
"There are, men off watch there who have to sleep," answered the Uruguayan. He stood up, knotting his fists together. "And if you think you can dictate to the rest of us-"
Lorenzen stood back, feeling the helpless embarrassment which quarrels always gave him. He tried to say something, but his tongue seemed thick in his mouth.
Friedrich von Osten chose that moment to enter. He stood in the farther doorway, swaying a little. It was well known he'd smuggled a case of whisky aboard. He wasn't an alcoholic, but there were no women along and he couldn't be polishing his beloved guns forever. A mercenary soldier in the ruins of Europe-even if he does get picked up for the Solar Academy, and makes good in the Patrol, and is named chief gunner for a star ship-doesn't develop other interests.
"Vot iss?" he asked thickly.
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