"Blish, James - Common Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)


Common Time
". . . the days went slowly round and round, endless
and uneventful as cycles in space. Time, and time-pieces!
How many centuries did my hammock tell, as pendulum-
like it swung to the ship's dull roll, and ticked the hours
and ages."
Herman Melville, in Mardi
Don't move.
It was the first thought that came into Garrard's mind
when he awoke, and perhaps it saved his life. He lay where
he was, strapped against the padding, listening to the round
hum of the engines. That in itself was wrong; he should be
unable to hear the overdrive at all.
He thought to himself: Has it begun already?
Otherwise everything seemed normal. The DPC-3 had
crossed over into interstellar velocity, and he was still alive,
and the ship was still functioning. The ship should at this
moment be traveling at 22.4 times the speed of lighta neat
4,157,000 miles per second.
Somehow Garrard did not doubt that it was. On both
previous tries, the ships had whiffed away toward Alpha Cen-
tauri at the proper moment when the overdrive should have
cut in; and the split second of residual image after they had
vanished, subjected to spectroscopy, showed a Doppler shift
which tallied with the acceleration predicted for that moment
by Haertel.
The trouble was not that Brown and Cellini hadn't gotten
away in good order. It was simply that neither of them had
ever been heard from again.
Very slowly, he opened his eyes. His eyelids felt terrifically
heavy. As far as he could judge from the pressure of the
couch against his skin, the gravity was normal; nevertheless,
moving his eyelids seemed almost an impossible job.
After long concentration, he got them fully open. The
instrument chassis was directly before him, extended over his
diaphragm on its elbow joint. Still without moving anything
but his eyesand those only with the utmost patiencehe
checked each of the meters. Velocity: 22.4 c. Operating tem-
perature: normal. Ship temperature: 37 C. Air pressure:
778 mm. Fuel: No. I tank full. No. 2 tank full. No. 3 tank
full. No. 4 tank nine tenths full. Gravity: I g. Calendar:
stopped.
He looked at it closely, though his eyes seemed to focus
very slowly, too. It was, of course, something more than a
calendarit was an all-purpose clock, designed to show him
the passage of seconds, as well as of the ten months his trip
was supposed to take to the double star. But there was no
doubt about it: the second hand was motionless.
That was the second abnormality. Garrard felt an impulse