"Asimov, Isaac - 1. Foundation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asimov Isaac)

travelled half a million miles, or as many light years.
He had steeled himself just a little for the Jump through hyper-space, a
phenomenon one did not experience in simple interplanetary trips. The Jump
remained, and would probably remain forever, the only practical method of
travelling between the stars. Travel through ordinary space could proceed at no
rate more rapid than that of ordinary light (a bit of scientific knowledge that
belonged among the items known since the forgotten dawn of human history), and
that would have meant years of travel between even the nearest of inhabited
systems. Through hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space
nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the
length of the Galaxy in the interval between two neighboring instants of time.
Gaal had waited for the first of those Jumps with a little dread curled gently
in his stomach, and it ended in nothing more than a trifling jar, a little
internal kick which ceased an instant before he could be sure he had felt it.
That was all.
And after that, there was only the ship, large and glistening; the cool
production of 12,000 years of Imperial progress; and himself, with his doctorate
in mathematics freshly obtained and an invitation from the great Hari Seldon to
come to Trantor and join the vast and somewhat mysterious Seldon Project.
What Gaal was waiting for after the disappointment of the Jump was that first
sight of Trantor. He haunted the View-room. The steel shutter-lids were rolled
back at announced times and he was always there, watching the hard brilliance of
the stars, enjoying the incredible hazy swarm of a star cluster, like a giant
conglomeration of fire-flies caught in mid-motion and stilled forever, At one
time there was the cold, blue-white smoke of a gaseous nebula within five light
years of the ship, spreading over the window like distant milk, filling the room
with an icy tinge, and disappearing out of sight two hours later, after another
Jump.
The first sight of Trantor's sun was that of a hard, white speck all but lost in
a myriad such, and recognizable only because it was pointed out by the ship's
guide. The stars were thick here near the Galactic center. But with each Jump,
it shone more brightly, drowning out the rest, paling them and thinning them
out.
An officer came through and said, "View-room will be closed for the remainder of
the trip. Prepare for landing."
Gaal had followed after, clutching at the sleeve of the white uniform with the
Spaceship-and-Sun of the Empire on it.
He said, "Would it be possible to let me stay? I would like to see Trantor."
The officer smiled and Gaal flushed a bit. It occurred to him that he spoke with
a provincial accent.
The officer said, "We'll be landing on Trantor by morning."
"I mean I want to see it from Space."
"Oh. Sorry, my boy. If this were a space-yacht we might manage it. But we're
spinning down, sunside. You wouldn't want to be blinded, burnt, and
radiation-scarred all at the same time, would you?"
Gaal started to walk away.
The officer called after him, "Trantor would only be gray blur anyway, Kid. Why
don't you take a space-tour once you hit Trantor. They're cheap."
Gaal looked back, "Thank you very much."
It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally