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

course, for as long as the fuel lasted, and the fuel bred itself.
Even if Garrard ate a meal every three seconds of objective,
or ship, time (which, he realized suddenly, he wouldn't be
able to do, for it took the ship several seconds of objective
time to prepare and serve up a meal once it was ordered; he'd
be lucky if he ate once a day, Garrard-time), there would be
no reason to fear any shortage of supplies. That had been one
of the earliest of the possibilities for disaster that the Project
engineers had ruled out in the design of the DFC-3.
But nobody had thought to provide a mechanism which
would indefinitely refurbish Garrard. After six thousand
years, there would be nothing left of him but a faint film
of dust on the DFC-3's dully gloaming horizontal surfaces.
His corpse might outlast him a while, since the ship itself
was sterilebut eventually he would be consumed by the
bacteria which he carried in his own digestive tract. He
needed those bacteria to synthesize part of his B-vitamin needs
while he lived, but they would consume him without compunc-
tion once he had ceased to be as complicated and delicately
balanced a thing as a pilotor as any other kind of life.
Garrard was, in short, to die before the DFC-3 had gotten
fairly away from Sol; and when, after 12,000 apparent
years, the DFC-3 returned to Earth, not even his mummy
would be still aboard.
The chill that went through him at that seemed almost
unrelated to the way he thought he felt about the discovery;
it lasted an enormously long time, and insofar as he could
characterize it at all, it seemed to be a chill of urgency and
excitementnot at all the kind of chill he should be feeling
at a virtual death sentence. Luckily it was not as intolerably
violent as the last such emotional convulsion; and when it
was over, two clock ticks later, it left behind a residuum of
doubt.
Suppose that this effect of time-stretching was only men-
tal? The rest of his bodily processes might still be keeping
ship-time; Garrard had no immediate reason to believe other-
wise. If so, he would be able to move about only on
ship-time, too; it would take many apparent months to
complete the simplest task.
But he would live, if that were the case. His mind would
arrive at Alpha Centauri six thousand years older, and
perhaps madder, than his body, but he would live.
If, on the other hand, his bodily movements were going
to be as fast as his mental processes, he would have to be
enormously careful. He would have to move slowly and
exert as little force as possible. The normal human hand
movement, in such a task as lifting a pencil, took the pencil
from a state of rest to another state of rest by imparting to
it an acceleration of about two feet per second per second
and, of course, decelerated it by the same amount. If Garrard