"Bindlestiff - James Blish V1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

"Hm-m-m. Big correction." There was a long, itching silence. "Amalfi?"

"Yeah."

"About ten parsecs, give or take 0.4. I'd say you've found a floater, my boy."

"Thanks." Amalfi put the phone back and drew a deep breath. "What a relief."

"You won't find any colonists on a star that isolated," Hazleton reminded him.

"I don't care. It's a landing point, possibly a fuel or even a food source. Most stars have planets; a freak like this might not, or it might have dozens. Just cross your fingers."

He stared at the tiny sun, his eyes aching from sympathetic strain. A star in the middle of the Rift-almost certainly a wild star, moving at four hundred or five hundred k.p.s. It occurred to him that a people living on a planet of that star might remember the moment when it burst through the near wall and embarked upon its journey into the emptiness.

"There might be people there," he said. "The Rift was swept clean of stars once, somehow. Jake claims that that's an overdramatic way of putting it, that the mean motions of the stars probably opened the gap naturally. But either way that sun
must be a recent arrival, going at quite a clip, since it's moving counter to the general tendency. It could have been colonized while it was still passing through a populated area. Runaway stars tend to collect hunted criminals as they go by, Mark."

"Possibly," Hazleton admitted. "By the way, that image is coming in from your lead proxy, 'way out across the valley. Don't you have any outriggers? I ordered them sent."

"Sure. But I don't use them except for routine. Cruising the Rift lengthwise would be suicide. We'll take a look if you like."

He touched the board. On the screen, the far wall was wiped away. Nothing was left but thin haze; down at that end, the Rift turned, and eventually faded out into a nh of emptiness, soaking into the sands of the stars.

"Nothing there. Lots of nothing."

Amalfi moved the switch again.

On the screen, apparently almost within hallooing distance, a city was burning.

SPACE flight got its start, as a war weapon, amid the collapse of the great Western culture of Earth. In the succeeding centuries it was almost forgotten. The new culture, that vast planar despotism called by historiographers the Bureaucratic State, did not think that way.

Not that the original Soviets or their successors forbade space travel. They simply never thought of it. Space flight had been a natural, if late, result of Western thought-patterns, which had always been ambitious for the infinite, but the geometrically flat dialectic of the succeeding culture could not include it. Where the West had soared from the rock like a sequoia, the Soviets spread like lichens, tightening their grip, satisfied to be at the very bases of the pillars of sunlight the West had sought to ascend.

The coming of the spindizzy-the antigravity generator, or gravitron-spelled the doom of the flat culture, as the leveling menace of the nuclear reactor had cut down the soaring West. Space flight returned; not, this time, as a technique of tiny ships and individual adventure, but as a project of cities.

There was no longer any reason why a man-carrying vehicle to cross space needed to be small, cramped, organized foreand-aft, penurious of weight. The spindizzy could lift any-
thing, and protect it, too. Most important, its operation was rooted in a variation of the value of c as a limit. The overdrive, the meteor screen, and antigravity had all avrived in one compact package, labeled "G = (2PC)2/(BU)2."

Every culture has its characteristic mathematic, in which histoniographers can see its inevitable form. This one, couched in the algebra of the Magian culture, pointing toward the matrix-mechanics of the new Nomad era, was a Western discovery. Blackett had found the essential relationship between gravity and magnetism, and Dirac had explained why it had not been detected before. Yet despite all of the minority groups butchered or "concentrated" by the Bureaucratic State, only the pure mathematicians went unsuspected about the destruction of that State, innocent even in their own minds of revolutionary motives.

The exodus began.

At first it was logical enough. The Aluminum Trust, the Thorium Trust, the Germanium Trust put their plants aloft bodily, to mine the planets. The Steel Trust made it possible for the rest, for it had turned Mars into the Pittsburgh of the solar system, and lulled the doubts of the State.

But the Thorium Trust's Plant No. 8 never came back. The revolution against the planar culture began as simply as that.

The first of the Okie cities soared away from the solar system, looking for work among the colonists-colonists left stranded among the stars by the ebb tide of Western civilization. The new culture began among these nomad cities, and before long Earth was virtually deserted.

But Earth laws, though much changed, survived. It was still possible to make a battleship, and the Okies were ungainly. Steam shovels, by and large, had been more characteristic of the West than tanks had been, but in a fight between the two the outcome was predictable; that situation never changed. The cities were the citizens-but there were still police.