"Anderson, Poul - Question and Answer (Planet of no Return)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)
"Could they have landed on Sister and come to grief there?" Christopher Umfanduma, the African biologist, gestured at the stark face of Ilium.
"No," said Hamilton. "Doctrine for these survey trips is that the expedition goes first to the planet it was announced it will go to. If for any reason they then go elsewhere, they leave a cairn big enough to be seen from space. We can check Sister, but my conviction is that the trouble happened on Junior. Sister is too typical, it's like Mars; nothing much can happen to well-trained spacemen on a place like that."
"Other planets in this system?" asked Hideki. "Maybe they-"
"No, there aren't any. Just a stinking little group of asteroids in the other Trojan position. Planetary formation theory and considerations of stability just about prohibit anything else. You know, don't you, that Junior doesn't have true Trojan stability? No planet of a double star can have it; the mass ratio of the suns is always too small. Junior is only metastable because of Sister's effect. Not that it makes any difference on the time scale of human history. No, there are no other planets here."
"Of course," ventured Avery, very softly, "the expedition could perhaps have left Troas in good form and perished on the way home."
Hamilton snorted. "Nothing can happen to a ship in the warp. No, it's down-" his deep-set eyes went to the plane and rested there, darkly-" it's down on Junior that whatever happened to them, happened. But why no trace of them? The Da Gama herself ought still to be in orbit up here. The boats ought to be visible down there. Were they sunk into the ocean?"
"By whom?" Avery said it into a sudden enormous quiet. "Or by what?"
"There's no trace of intelligent life, I tell you," said Lorenzen wearily. "At this distance, our telescopes could spot anything from a city or an aircraft to the thatch hut of some savage."
"Maybe they don't build huts," said Avery. His face looked abstracted.
"Shut up," snapped Hamilton. "You've got no business here anyway. This is a mapping room."
Hideki shivered. "It looks cold down there," he said. "Bleak."
"It isn't," said Fernandez. "Around the equator, the climate ought to be rather like, say, Norway or Maine. And you will note that the trees and grasses go right up to the swamps at the foot of the glaciers. Glacial periods aren't anywhere near as barren as people think; Earth was full of animal life in the Pleistocene, and it wasn't till hunting got worse when the glaciers receded that man was forced to develop agriculture and become civilized. Anyway, those glaciers are on the way out; I've seen distinct moraines in the photographs. When we settle here and jack up the carbon dioxide content of the air, you will be surprised how fast Junior will develop its own tropics. A few hundred years, perhaps. Geologically, nothing!" He snapped his fingers and grinned.
"If we settle it," grunted Hamilton. "Now, how long before you can have reliable maps, Lorenzen?"
"Uummm-well-a week, maybe. But do we have to wait that long?"
"We do. I want one overall map on a scale of one to a million, and enough others to cover the central valley region where we'll land-say from five degrees on either side of the equator-on one to 10,000. Print up about fifty copies of each. Run your prime meridian through the north magnetic pole; you can send down a roboflyer to locate it."
Lorenzen groaned inwardly. He had the cartographic machines to help him, but it wasn't going to be fun.
"I'll take a boat and a few men and run over for a closer look at Sister," went on Hamilton. "Not that I expect to find anything much, but-" Suddenly he grinned. "You can name the conspicuous features down there anything you like, but for God's sake don't be like that Chilean map-man at Epsilon Eridani III! His maps had been official for ten years before they found out every one of his names was an Araucanian obscenity!"
He clapped the astronomer's shoulder and pulled himself out of the room. Not a bad sort, thought Lorenzen. He's a better psychman than Avery; though Ed isn't such a slouch either. He just lacks personality.
He decided to stick by the classical nomenclature of the Hercules expedition. Mount Olympus, Mount Ida, the huge river down there would be the Scamander-and, of course, it wouldn't last. When the colonists came, it would be Old Baldy, Conchinjangua, Ndvaya Neva-
If the colonists came.
"Let's, uh, let's get organized," he said aloud, awkwardly. "How many here know anything about cartography?"
"I do," said Avery unexpectedly. "I'll help out if you wish."
"Where in cosmos did you pick that up?" asked Fernandez.
"Part of my education. A lot of applied psychodynamics consists of conformal mapping, though we generally have to use spaces of several dimensions and and non-Cartesian coordinates. I can handle a mapping machine as well as you can."
He crooked an arm around a hand rung and let his legs stream out behind him. Avery had said his tendency to space sickness was mostly psychological. It might help him to take his mind off the work and the coldly shining planet out there, just for a few minutes.
"How precise is your science, anyway?" he asked. "The popular articles on it are always so vague."
"Well-" Avery rubbed his chin. He hung cross-legged in the air like a small Buddha, his eyes remote. "Well, we don't claim the precision of the physical sciences," he said finally. "In fact, it's been shown rigorously that we can never achieve it: a kind of uncertainty principle of our own, due to coupling between observer and system observed. But a lot has been learned."
"Such as what?" inquired Umfanduma. "I know about the advances in neurology; that's in my own line. But how about man as-as man, instead of as a biophysical mechanism?"
"The amount of knowledge depends on the particular field of study," said Avery. "Already before World War III, they were using games theory in military work, and later the big computers made it possible to analyze even complex phenomena like business from a theoretical viewpoint; that in turn led to some understanding of economics. Communications theory turned out to be widely applicable: man is, after all, essentially a symbolizing animal. The least effort axiom was useful. Gradually a mathematical and paramathematical system has been built up, in which the elements-potentials, gradients, and so on-can be equated with observable phenomena; thus it becomes possible to derive theorems. It's still hard to check the validity of many of these theorems because conditions at home are too confused even today and, of course, you can't very well run a controlled experiment with human beings; but insofar as we have data, they confirm the present theories. Quite often it's possible to predict large-scale things like economic cycles with high precision."
"Didn't the dictators know most of that?" asked Lorenzen. "They certainly had effective propaganda techniques. I was more interested in modern developments."
"Most of it is modern," snorted Avery. "Very little that went before was of scientific value. To consider only the history of my own region, North America: The propagandists of capital and labor, the advertising men, worked on such a primitive level, with such a primitive appeal, that quite often they produced a reaction against themselves. They were only part of the mass-psychological debacle that led to military defeat. The commissars were mentally blinkered by their own out-worn ideology; they never dared investigate beyond its dogma. The self-styled liberators were only interested in getting that power for themselves; it wasn't their propaganda which won the people to them, but the commissars' tyranny, and they were soon just as unpopular. The warlords during the Interregnum did have psychomilitary-analysts, yes, but the only original work then was done in Brazil. Later, in the theocratic period, research was pushed because the Mongku Empire presented a challenge, and the first politicomathematical analyses were performed. But it wasn't till after Venus had taken over and Earth was temporarily at peace and the theocrats tossed out of America, that really thorough research was done. Then, of course, we finally got the formulated psychodynamics, the field and tensor approach, and it was used to bring on the Mars-Venus war and unify the Solar System-but the completed science had been worked out by peaceful professors interested only in the problem itself; their type is still doing all the major new work."
"Whew!" laughed Umfanduma.
"Completed science, did you say?" inquired Lorenzen. "I thought-"
"Oh, yes, work is still going on, all the time. But the results are already far enough along to be of inestimable value. Control of the economic cycle, for instance; the most efficient distribution of cities; currency stabilization; the gradual weaning of man away from barbarism toward the first really mature civilization-a civilization where everyone is sane." Something glowed behind the pudgy face and the blinking pale eyes. "It's a heartbreakingly big job, it'll take centuries and there'll be many setbacks and failures and mistakes-but at least, for the first time in history, we have not only good intentions, but some idea of how to implement them."
"Yes, I suppose so," murmured Lorenzen. His mind continued: You can't elect a psychocrat, any more than you can elect an engineer. I don't want an elite of any kind, the world has seen too many of them; with all its maddening drawbacks, parliamentary government is still the only way; the psychocrats must still remain only advisors.
But one gets into the habit of letting the advisors lead-
He sighed and shoved away from the wall. "Come on," he said. "Work to do."
CHAPTER VI
Lorenzen knew that an unknown planet was approached cautiously, but the knowledge had only been in the top of his head. This was the first time he lived through that care, and it nearly drove him crazy.
When the maps were ready, four boats descended-forty men, with a skeleton crew remaining on the Hudson in her orbit. Fernandez sweated on the way down; it was he who had picked the landing site, and his fault if it turned out to be a morass or an earthquake region. But nothing happened.
That was exactly the trouble-nothing happened. They landed some kilometers from the Scamander, on a wide green plain dotted with clumps of trees and hazing into blue distance. Silence fell when the rockets were cut off; the grass fire they had started burned itself out; and men stared wistfully through the viewports at the sunlit world ouside.
The chemists and biologists were busy. There was detailed analysis to do-of air, of soil and vegetation samples brought in by robots.
Thornton checked radiation and reported nothing harmful. A cageful of rhesus monkeys was set outside and left for a week. During that week, nobody stirred from the boats. The robots which came and went were sterilized with savage thoroughness in the airlocks. There was nothing for the rest of the men to do.
Lorenzen buried himself in his microbooks, but even Shakespeare and Jensen and The Song of the Jovian Men got wearisome. Others puttered about, quibbled with each other, yawned and slept and woke blearily to another day of nothing. There were no open quarrels on this boat because Hamilton was aboard it; but the captain often had to snap furiously over the telescreen at men in the other craft.
Fernandez came close to losing his temper once. He protested to Hamilton: "You can't be that frightened of sickness!"
"I sure as hell can," grunted the captain. "If evolution on this planet is as close to Earth's as it seems to be, you can bet your degree there are some microbes which can live off us. And I want to go home on my feet. The least I can do is make reasonably sure we won't catch anything airborne."
Hideki and his team reported on such plants as they had analyzed: essentially terrestroid, though denser and tougher. Some were poisonous because of heavy-metal content or the like, but most could be eaten quite safely. A man could live well on the wild vegetation alone. It would take more study, though, to determine just how many sorts you had to eat for a balanced diet.
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