"Anderson, Poul - Saturn Game by Poul Anderson" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

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The Saturn Game

Poul Anderson

One of the writing problems peculiar to science fiction is that science has a way of catching up with your imagining. Just as you finish writing a book about the poor folks who live on the perpetually dark side of Mercury, the damned Mariner flyby shows that there's no such thing as a dark side. Out the window with the manuscript (maybe followed by the typewriter and even the writer).
Poul Anderson was one of the dozen or so science fiction writers invited by the Jet Propulsion Laboratories to witness the first Saturn flyby at their headquarters in Pasadena. Most of us adjourned to the company cafeteria, getting out of the way of the working press and overworked scientists, watching the marvelous pictures come in as we sipped coffee and swapped tales. There was quite a feeling of suspense, since very little was known about any of the planet's satellites, so in effect we had a brand-new world being presented to us every few hours. Poul was the only one actually on the edge of his seat, though; he said he had just finished a story set on Iapetus. The background was perforce 95 percent imagination, since very little could be deduced about the satellite from earthbound observation. One clear picture could blow him out of the water. Fortunately for all of us, the Pioneer cooperated with Poul's imaginings. The story was "The Saturn Game," and it won the Nebula for best novella of the year.
No one but Poul Anderson could have written this story. That's true in a literal sense of any story, any author, because even a tired, trite rehash of boy-meets-girl will show some evidence of having been written by a particular boy or girl. But "The Saturn Game, " besides being startlingly original in structure and plot, reveals a combination of special knowledge and special feeling that amounts to oblique autobiography. Poul is a consummate "hard science" writer, who not only sports a degree in physics (with honors) but, more important, reveals in books like Tau Zero that he keeps up with the fast-changing science. He is also a swashbuckling romantic, with such titles as Hrolf Kraki's Saga and The Last Viking to his credit. The association with sword-and-sorcery derring-do percolates over into "real" life: Poul was one of the founders of the Society for Creative Anachronism, an outfit dedicated to the re-creation and celebration of medieval life through costumed fairs and tourneys, usually livened up with a certain amount of barely controlled mayhem as the participants duel with somewhat blunted weapons.
In the man, these two worlds are well integrated, apparently Poul is a soft-spoken charmer who wouldn't smite a fly. In the story, well, it's another story.

If we are to understand what happened, which is vital if we are to avoid repeated and worse tragedies in the future we must begin by dismissing all accusations. Nobody was negligent; no action was foolish. For who could have predicted the eventuality, or recognized its nature, until too late? Rather should we appreciate the spirit with which those people struggled against disaster, inward and outward, after they knew. The fact is that thresholds exist throughout reality, and that things on

their far sides are altogether different from things on their hither sides. The Chronos crossed more than an abyss, it` crossed a threshold of human experience.
-Francis L. Minamoto, Death:
Under Saturn: A Dissenting View
(Apollo University Communications, Leyburg, Luna, 2057)

I

"The City of Ice is now on my horizon," Kendrick says. Its. towers gleam blue. "My griffin spreads his wings to glide." Wind whistles among those great, rainbow-shimmering pinions ' His cloak blows back from his shoulders; the air strikes through'. his ring-mail and sheathes him in cold. "I lean over and pee after you." The spear in his left hand counterbalances him. It head flickers palely with the moonlight that Wayland Smith; hammered into the steel.
"Yes, I see the griffin," Ricia tells him, "high and far, like a comet above the courtyard walls. I run out from under the: portico for a better look. A guard tries to stop me, grabs my; sleeve, but I tear the spider silk apart and dash forth into the. open." The elven castle wavers as if its sculptured ice were turning to smoke. Passionately, she cries, "Is it in truth you, my darling?"
"Hold, there!" warns Alvarlan from his cave of arcana, ten thousand leagues away. "I send your mind the message that if the King suspects this is Sir Kendrick of the Isles,=, he will raise a dragon against him, or spirit you off beyond any chance of rescue. Go back, Princess of Maranoa. Pretend' you decide that it is only an eagle. I will cast a belief-spell on your words."
"I stay far aloft," Kendrick says. "Save he use a crying~ stone, the Elf King will not be aware this beast has a rider.. From here I'll spy out city and castle." And then-? He knows.
not. He knows simply that he must set her free or die in the quest. How long will it take him, how many more nights will she lie in the King's embrace?
"I thought you were supposed to spy out Iapetus," Mark Danzig interrupted.
His dry tone startled the three others into alertness. Jean Broberg flushed with embarrassment, Colin Scobie with irritation; Luis Garcilaso shrugged, grinned, and turned his gaze to the pilot console before which he sat harnessed. For a moment silence filled the cabin, and shadows, and radiance from the universe.
To help observation, all lights were out except a few dim glows from the instruments. The sunward ports were lidded. Elsewhere thronged stars, so many and so brilliant that they well-nigh drowned the blackness which held them. The Milky Way was a torrent of silver. One port framed Saturn at half phase, dayside pale gold and rich bands amidst the jewelry of its rings, night side wanly ashimmer with starlight upon clouds, as big to the sight as Earth over Luna.
Forward was Iapetus. The spacecraft rotated while orbiting the moon, to maintain a steady optical field. It had crossed the dawn line, presently at the middle of the inward-facing hemisphere. Thus it had left bare, crater-pocked land behind it in the dark, and was passing above sunlit glacier country. Whiteness dazzled, glittered in sparks and shards of color, reached fantastic shapes heavenward; cirques, crevasses, caverns brimmed with blue.
"1'm sorry," Jean Broberg whispered. "It's too beautiful, unbelievably beautiful, and . . . almost like the place where our game had brought us. Took us by surprise-"
"Huh!" Mark Danzig said. "You had a pretty good idea of what to expect, therefore you made your play go in the direction of something that resembled it. Don't tell me any different. I've watched these acts for eight years."
Colin Scobie made a savage gesture. Spin and gravity were too slight to give noticeable weight, and his movement

sent him flying through the air, across the crowded cabin. He checked himself by a handhold just short of the chemist. "Are you calling Jean a liar?" he growled.
Most times he was cheerful, in a bluff fashion. Perhaps because of that, he suddenly appeared menacing. He was a big, sandy-haired man in his mid-thirties; a coverall did not disguise the muscles beneath, and the scowl on his face brought forth its ruggedness.
"Please!" Broberg exclaimed. "Not a quarrel, Colin."
The geologist glanced back at her. She was slender and fine-featured. At her age of forty-two, despite longevity treatment, the reddish-brown hair that fell to her shoulders was becoming streaked with white, and lines were engraved around large gray eyes.
"Mark is right," she sighed. "We're here to do science, not daydream." She reached forth to touch Scobie's arm, smiling shyly. "You're still full of your Kendrick persona, aren't you? Gallant, protective-" She stopped. Her voice had quickened with more than a hint of Ricia. She covered her lips and flushed again. A tear broke free and sparkled off on air currents. She forced a laugh. "But I'm just physicist Broberg, wife of astronomer Tom, mother of Johnnie and Billy."
Her glance went Saturn ward, as if seeking the ship where her family waited. She might have spied it, too, as a star that moved among stars by the solar sail. However, that was now furled, and naked vision could not find even such huge hulls as Chronos possessed, across millions of kilometers.
Luis Garcilaso asked from his pilot's chair: "What harm if we carry on our little commedia dell' arte?" His Arizona drawl soothed the ear. "We won't be landin' for a while yet, and everything's on automatic till then." He was small, swarthy, and deft, still in his twenties.
Danzig twisted his leathery countenance into a frown. At sixty, thanks to his habits as well as to longevity, he kept springiness in a lank frame; he could joke about wrinkles and encroaching baldness. In this hour, he set humor aside.
"Do you mean you don't know what's the matter?" His beak of a nose pecked at a scanner screen which magnified the moonscape. "Almighty God! That's a new world we're about to touch down on-tiny, but a world, and strange in ways we can't guess. Nothing's been here before us except one unmanned flyby and one unmanned lander that soon quit sending. We can't rely on meters and cameras alone. We've got to use our eyes and brains."
He addressed Scobie. "You should realize that in your bones, Colin, if nobody else aboard does. You've worked on Luna as well as on Earth. In spite of all the settlements, in spite of all the study that's been done, did you never hit any nasty surprises?"
The burly man had recovered his temper. Into his own voice came a softness that recalled the serenity of the Idaho mountains from which he hailed. "True," he admitted. "There's no such thing as having too much information when you're off Earth, or enough information, for that matter." He paused. "Nevertheless, timidity can be as dangerous as rashness-not that you're timid, Mark," he added in haste. "Why, you and Rachel could've been in a nice O'Neill on a nice pension-"
Danzig relaxed and smiled. "This was a challenge, if I may sound pompous. Just the same, we want to get home when we're finished here. We should be in time for the Bar Mitzvah of a great-grandson or two. Which requires staying alive."
"My point is," Scobie said, "if you let yourself get buffaloed, you may end up in a worse bind than- Oh, never mind. You're probably right, and we should not have begun fantasizing. The spectacle sort of grabbed us. It won't happen again."
Yet when Scobie's eyes looked anew on the glacier, they had not quite the dispassion of a scientist in them. Nor did Broberg's or Garcilaso's. Danzig slammed fist into palm. "The game, the damned childish game," he muttered, too low for