"Asimov, Isaac - Brin, David - Foundations Triumph" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asimov Isaac)

Hari's servant-guardian had argued against this trip, worrying aloud about the stress of travel. But in fact, it wasn't hard to get Kers to obey. Hari realized why the Valmoril's objections were so mild.

He knows that boredom is the worst threat to my health, right now. If I don't find something useful to do, I'll just fade away. This little escapade probably won't amount to much. Space travel is still pretty routine. And meanwhile, I'll be too busy to let myself die.

So the two of them set out from his apartment the next morning, as if on a normal daily excursion. But instead of heading for the imperial gardens, Kers steered Hari onto a transitway bound for the Orion elevator.

As their car sped along, and the surrounding metal tube seemed to flow past in a blur, Hari kept wondering if they would be stopped at some point along the way. It was a real possibility.

Had the Special Police really been withdrawn, as Gaal assured? Or were they watching him even now, with little spy cameras and other gadgets?

A year ago, right after the trial, official surveillance had been intense, sniffing each corner of Hari's life and eyeing his every move. But a lot had changed since then. Linge Chen was now convinced by the cooperation of Hari and the Fifty. There had been no more disruptive news leaks about an "imminent collapse of the empire." More importantly, the move to Terminus was going according to plan. The hundred thousand experts that Hari had recruited with promises of employment on a vast Encyclopedia Galactica project were now being prepared and sent in groups to that far-off little world and a glorious destiny they could not possibly suspect.

In that case, why would Chen keep paying professional officers to watch a dying crackpot professor, when their skills could better be employed dealing with other crises?

Soon a chime announced the car's arrival at the Grand Vestibule. Hari and Kers emerged into a mammoth chamber that stretched twenty kilometers across and tapered vertically toward heights that vanished in a misty haze.

Anchored to the ground in the very center was a huge black pillar, more than a hundred meters wide, that reared straight upward. The eye assumed that this mighty column held up the distant roof, but the eye was fooled. It wasn't a pillar, but a great cable, stretching outward through a hole in that remote ceiling, continuing past Trantor's atmosphere, linking the solid surface to a massive space station that whirled in orbit, fifty thousand kilometers above.

Along its great length, Orion elevator seemed infested with countless bulges that kept flowing up and down like parasites burrowing under the skin of a slender stalk. These were elevator cars, partly masked by a flexible membrane that protected passengers against dangerous radiation, and from having to look upon vertiginous views.

At the very bottom of this monumental structure, people could be seen debarking from newly arrived capsules, passing through brief immigration formalities, then moving toward a maze of ramps and moving walkways. Other streams of individuals flowed in the opposite direction, aiming to depart. There were several lines for each social caste. Kers chose one of the shorter queues, clearly marked as reserved for meritocrat VIPs.

In theory, I could use the special portal for high nobility, Hari thought, glancing toward an aisle lined with silky fabrics, where fawning attendants saw to the needs of super-planetary gentry. Any former First Minister of the Empire has that right. Even a disgraced one, like me. But that would surely attract too much attention.

Hari's car was half-empty, since the space elevators were being used much less these days.

I'm partly responsible for that, he recalled. Most traffic to and from Trantor arrived by hyperspatial jump ships, which floated to the ground on their own self-generated gravity fields. A growing swarm of them shuttled up and down with food and other necessities for the empire's administrative center. Twenty agricultural worlds had been dedicated to supplying this lifeline-up from a mere eight before Hari became First Minister.

Trantor used to create its own basic food supply in huge solar-powered vats, operated by swarms of busy automatons who didn't mind the stench and grinding labor. When that system collapsed during the infamous Tiktok Revolt, one of his first duties in office had been to make up the difference, multiplying the flow of imported food and other goods.

But the new system is expensive and inefficient. And that lifeline will become a deadly trap in coming centuries. He knew this from the equations of psychohistory. Emperors and oligarchs will pay ever-greater attention to preserving it, at the expense of important business elsewhere.

To enhance their loyalty, the agricultural worlds had been joined even closer to Trantor itself, sharing the same "planetary" government, an act that now helped to justify Hari's ruse.

Though he did not turn on the outside viewer, it was easy to visualize the planet's gleaming anodized metal coat, reflecting the densely packed starfield of the galaxy's crowded center-millions of dazzling suns that glittered like fiery gems, making night almost like day. Though many in the empire envisioned Trantor as one giant city, much of the stainless-steel surface was only a veneer, just a few stories thick, laid down for show after mountains and valleys had been leveled. Those flat warrens were mostly used for storing old records. Actual office towers, factories, and habitations occupied no more than ten percent of the planet's area . . . easily enough room for forty billion people to live and work efficiently.

Still, the popular image was accurate enough. This center of empire was like the galactic core itself-a crowded place. Even knowing the psychohistorical reasons for it all left Hari bemused.

"Right now we're passin' halfway point," the young porter explained, playing up her role as tour guide. "Those of you who forgot to take your pills might be experiencin' some upset as we head toward null gee," she went on, "but in most cases that's just your imagination actin' up. Try to think of somethin' nice, and it often goes away."

Horis Antic wasn't much cheered. Though he surely traveled extensively in his line of work, he might never have used this peculiar type of transport. The bureaucrat hurriedly popped several tablets from his belt dispenser and swallowed them.

"Of course most people nowadays come to Trantor by star-ship," the girl went on. "So my advice is to just keep tellin' yourself that this here cable is over five thousand years old, made in the glory days of great engineers. So in a sense, you're just as well anchored as if you were still connected to the ground!"

Hari had seen other porters do this sort of thing, extroverts going beyond the call of duty while trying to make light of a prosaic job. But few ever had an audience as difficult as dour Kers Kantun and nervous Horis Antic, who kept chewing his nails, clearly wishing the girl would go away. But she went on chattering happily.

"Sometimes visitors ask what'd happen if this cable we're ridin' ever broke! Well let me assure you it ain't possible. At least that's what the ancients who made this stringy thing promised. Though I'm sure you all know how things are goin' these days. So you're welcome to imagine along with me what might happen if someday ..."

She went on to describe, with evident relish, how all of Trantor's space elevators-Orion. Lesmic, Gengi, Pliny, and Zul-might break apart in some hypothetical future calamity. The upper half of each great tether, including the transfer stations, would spin away into space, while the lower half, weighing billions of tons, would plummet into the ground at incredible speeds, releasing enough explosive force to pierce the metal veneer all the way to Trantor's geothermal power pipes, unleashing a globe-girdling chain of new volcanos.