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

to get up and see if he could start the clock again. Perhaps
the trouble had been temporary and safely in the past. Im-
mediately there sounded in his head the injunction he had
drilled into himself for a full month before the trip had
begun
Don't move!
Don't move until you know the situation as far as it can
be known without moving. Whatever it was that had snatched
Brown and Cellini irretrievably beyond human ken was
potent, and totally beyond anticipation. They had both been
excellent men, intelligent, resourceful, trained to the point
of diminishing returns and not a micron beyond that point
the best men in the Project. Preparations for every knowable
kind of trouble had been built into their ships, as they had
been built into the DFC-3. Therefore, if there was something
wrong nevertheless, it would be something that might strike
from some commonplace quarterand strike only once.
He listened to the humming. It was even and placid, and
not very loud, but it disturbed him deeply. The overdrive
was supposed to be inaudible, and the tapes from the first
unmanned test vehicles had recorded no such hum. The
noise did not appear to interfere with the overdrive's opera-
tion, or to indicate any failure in it. It was just an irrelevancy
for which he could find no reason.
But the reason existed. Garrard did not intend to do so
much as draw another breath until he found out what it was.
Incredibly, he realized for the first time that he had not
in fact drawn one single breath since he had first come to.
Though he felt not the slightest discomfort, the discovery
called up so overwhelming a flash of panic that he very
nearly sat bolt upright on the couch. Luckilyor so it
seemed, after the panic had begun to ebbthe curious leth-
argy which had affected his eyelids appeared to involve his
whole body, for the impulse was gone before he could sum-
mon the energy to answer it. And the panic, poignant though
it had been for an instant, turned out to be wholly intel-
lectual. In a moment, he was observing that his failure to
breathe in no way discommoded him as far as he could tell
it was just there, waiting to be explained . . .
Or to kill him. But it hadn't, yet.
Engines humming; eyelids heavy; breathing absent; calen-
dar stopped. The four facts added up to nothing. The temp-
tation to move somethingeven if it were only a big toe
was strong, but Garrard fought it back. He had been awake
only a short whilehalf an hour at mostand already had
noticed four abnormalities. There were bound to be more,
anomalies more subtle than these four; but available to close
examination before he had to move. Nor was there anything
in particular that he had to do, aside from caring for his own
wants; the Project, on the chance that Brown's and Cellini's