"Blish, James - Earth of Hours" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

center of the Galaxy than we've ever gotten before. It
may be a population center too; could be that Calle is just
one piece of a federation, at least inside its own cluster.
That's why we've got the boys from Momma on board; this
one could be damn important."
Somebody sniffed. "If this cluster is full of people, how
come we never picked up signals from it?"
"How do you know we never did?" Oberholzer retorted.
"For all I know, maybe that's why the Assam Dragon came
here in the first place. Anyhow that's not our problem. All
we're"
The lights went out. Simultaneously, the whole mass of
the Novoe Washingtongrad shuddered savagely, as though a
boulder almost as big as she was had been dropped on her.
Seconds later, the gravity went out too.
2
Flo-Mar 12-Upjohn knew no more of the real nature of
the disaster than did the wardroom squad, nor did anybody
on the bridge, for that matter. The blow had been inde-
tectable until it struck, and then most of the fleet was
simply annihilated; only the Hobo was big enough to survive
the blow, and she survived only partiallyin fact, in five
pieces. Nor did the Consort of State ever know by what
miracle the section he was in hit Calle still partially under
power; he was not privy to the self-salvaging engineering
principles of battleships. All he knewonce he struggled
back to consciousnesswas that he was still alive, and that
there was a broad shaft of sunlight coming through a top-
to-bottom split in one wall of what had been his office
aboard ship.
He held his ringing head for a while, then got up in
search of water. Nothing came out of the dispenser, so he
unstrapped his dispatch case from the underside of his desk
and produced a pint palladium flask of vodka. He had
screwed up his face to sample thisat the moment he
would have preferred waterwhen a groan reminded him
that there might be more than one room in his suddenly
shrunken universe, as well as other survivors.
He was right on both counts. "Though the ship section he
was in consisted mostly of engines of whose function he had
no notion, there were also three other staterooms. Two of
these were deserted, but the third turned out to contain a
battered member of his own staff, by name Robin One.
The young man was not yet conscious and 12-Up]'ohn
regarded him with a faint touch of despair. Robin One was
perhaps the last man in space that the Consort of State
would have chosen to be shipwrecked with.
That he was utterly expendable almost went without say-
ing; he was, after all, a drone. When the perfection of
sperm electrophoresis had enabled parents for the first time