"Asimov, Isaac - Robot City 05 - Refuge - Robert Chilson 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asimov Isaac)

It was a reasonable guess. Nobody could remember all the miles of numbers that was a star chart. Charts were rarely printed out in whole, though for convenience in calculation, some sections might be. This little ship didn't have a printer. All it had--they presumed--was a recording in its memory.

But they couldn't find it.

Even that wouldn't have been too serious if the hyper-wave hadn't gone out on them. Lacking charts, in orbit about Robot City, they had swept space with the hyperwave and picked up Kappa Whale Arcadia quite well. The fix was good enough to Jump toward, and they had done that. Logically, they should then have been able to pick up other beacons and hop, skip, and jump their way to anywhere in inhabited space: the fifty Spacer worlds, or the Settler worlds that Earth had recently begun to occupy.

"We're somewhere within telescopic distance of Arcadia,'' murmured Derec. That was a minor and distant Spacer world. But they had no idea on which side of it !ay the constellation of the Whale. They knew only that this--Kappa--was the ninth-brightest star in that constellation, and that there was only one fainter, Lambda Whale. Constellations, by interstellar agreement, had, for astrogational purposes, no more than ten stars.

"Sooner or laterr a ship will come," Wolruf said reassuringly.

Sooner or later. Derec grunted.

He didn't need to have the argument repeated; it had been mostly his. When they found that, after the Jump, the hy-perwave would only pick up the nearest beacon, Derec had suggested that they lie low until a ship came by, and request a copy of the astrogational charts from it. To beam a copy over would take the ship only a few minutes, and be no trouble at all.

Sooner or later.

"Soup's on, or stew in this case," Ariel said. The oven opened with an exhalation of savory steam. "We still have some of your crusty bread, Derec. I reheated it. But we'll want more later."

"It smells good," Derec said honestly. Wolruf, with even greater honesty, licked her chops and grinned. Derec had overcome his irritation at Ariel's invasion of the male preserve of the chief of cuisine, and had admitted to her that she was a better chef than he. (Common cooking was robot work, which no human admitted to doing.)

They ate in silence for a short while. The stew was served in covered bowls, but it clung to the inner surfaces. Manipulating their spoons carefully, they were able to eat without flinging food all over the ship. At first even Ariel's appetite was good, but she quickly lost interest.

"Do you think a ship will ever come by here?" she asked finally, her gaze, and apparently her thought, a long way away.

"Of course," said Derec quickly. "I admit I was too optimistic. I suspect we're well out on the edge of inhabited space; this lane is not too well traveled. But eventually...."

"Eventually..." she said, almost dreamily. She seemed, often now, in a drifting, abstracted state.

"Eventually," Derec repeated weakly.

He was too honest to try to argue her into belief. Ships didn't fly from star to star like an aircraft. They Jumped, with massive thrusts of their hyperatomic motors, going in a direction that was at right angles to time and all three spatial dimensions simultaneously. Since they went no-distance, it naturally took no-time to Jump. Therefore there were no lanes of star travel.

For safety reasons, ships Jumped from star to star; if one was stranded for any reason, rescuers had only to chart the route and check every star along it. And since not every star had inhabited planets, all along these well-traveled lanes (as ╖ they were called) were the beacon stars. A ship Jumping into this beacon system was supposed to verify that it had indeed arrived at Kappa Whale, beam its ship's log to the beacon's recorders, and depart. Periodically, patrol ships copied those records to assure that nothing untoward had happened.

But days had passed and no ships had appeared. Of course a ship appearing on the other side of Kappa Whale would not be detected by them on the electromagnetic band until it had Jumped out. The hyperwave radio, though, was functioning well enough to detect a ship reporting to the beacon anywhere in this stellar system. Derec and Wolmf agreed on that.

So: eventually they would be found and rescued.

Wolruf finished her meal by opening her bowl and licking it clean efficiently. "I wass thinking," she said. "Maybe Jump-wave shock shifted things in 'ou'rr hyperwave antenna.''

"Shifted the elements?" Derec nodded uncertainly. He had no idea where he had been educated, but he had a good general technical background with a strong specialty in ro-botics-not unusual for a Spacer youth, as he assumed himself to be. But hyperwave technology was a whole other and, if anything, even more difficult school of knowledge.

"Do 'ou have--'ou know--things to measure them with?"

Derec had seen a toolbox on the ship's schematic that he had accessed before going out to set up the recycling system. "There might be."

There was. A few minutes later, with Ariel listless at the detectors and Wolmf at the communicator, Derec carefully strode forward outside, followed by Mandelbrot.

The hyperwave antenna could have been put in any part of the ship, since the hyperatomo didn't kowtow to the laws of space-time, but it would have had to have been well shielded lest its backlash in the small ship damage the instruments, or even the crew. So in these Star Seeker models it was in a blister on the bow, as far from everything as possible.