"Blish, James - Mission To The Heart Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

Foreword
You have probably often had the experience of encountering, apparently for the first time, a new word - and then running into it three or four more times within just the next few days. Early in this book, for instance, you may make your first encounter with the word 'processing'; it means - movement of the axis of rotation. It's a very common word in astronomy and so, also, a part of the vocabulary of the space age. Hence you will run up against it again promptly. In fact, you've probably seen it often before, but your eye skipped over it because of its resemblance to 'processing'. Now you've become, so to speak, sensitized to it, and you marvel that it pops up so frequently in the first week that you've recognized its existence.
Writers will tell you that the same thing often happens in the realm of ideas. You may not have thought much about a subject before, nor have seen much written about it, either; but only sit down to plan a book about it, and references to it appear as explosively as popcorn. Three or four writers have described the process to me in the same words: 'It seems as if things just fall into my hands when I need them.'
I had a gratifying experience of this kind with this book. For several years, I have been wondering about the future of individual human freedom in a high-energy culture like ours. Regardless of the kind of political or economic system under which you find it, the high-energy culture (a term for which I think I am solely responsible) is alike everywhere in certain important ways. The most obvious of these is that it tends to consume more and more energy as time goes on, and to expend more and more energy; aeroplanes go higher and faster and gulp more and more fuel, cities grow and demand more electricity, and, alas, the amount of destruction that can be released by one bomb increases without any visible limits.
One not quite so obvious result of this is that as the years go by, things also tend to happen faster and faster, and to require decisions more quickly. These trends in turn have two additional effects. First, they tend to concentrate the power to make a decision in the hands of fewer and fewer people, many of them people whose very names we do not know. Second, they shorten the time in which a decision can be made, so as to make it impossible for these few executives and technicians to consult the rest of us, even though we shall all be profoundly affected by whatever they do or don't do.
I didn't arrive at any solution for this very complicated problem, but it did seem to me that the chances of worrying out an answer might be improved if I could at least spread the worry around a little. A science-fiction novel looked like a good way - indeed, the traditional way - to raise the questions; and, I thought, it should be a novel for young people, who will be living with the problem even more intimately than my generation has had to do. Furthermore, in a novel nobody expects or even welcomes blanket answers. I could simply prowl around the margins of the problem, giving the reader a look at it from as many different angles as my ingenuity could manage.
I had written not quite half of the manuscript when there arrived in the post the Autumn, 1962, issue of Technology and Culture, the official journal of the Society for the History of Technology. This issue was devoted to a conference on 'the technological order' which had been sponsored by the Encyclopaedia Britannica the preceding March in Santa Barbara, California. It was a 279-page gold mine of scholarly discussion of the very question I was writing about - including a paper by the eminent French philosopher, Jacques Ellul, which explored in detail a part of the problem that I had introduced into the novel just the preceding night!
And yet, in the words of my friends, it just fell into my hands. I was not a member of the Society for the History of Technology at the time, nor had I ordered the issue; it was sent to me out of the blue by Britannica Vice-President John S. Robling because, he said, 'I know you share with the editors of the 194-year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica an interest in the problems of our rapidly expanding technological age.' He was right about that, but I didn't know how he knew it, since I have never met Mr Robling. Then I found the name of L. Sprague de Camp, an old friend of mine and a science-fiction writer of stature, listed on the Society's advisory council
As a story, this book is an independent novel, but readers who would like to know more about Jack Loftus, Sandbag Stevens, Dr Langer, Sylvia McCrary, and their odd friends, the Angels, will find them also in a book called The Star Dwellers (Faber & Faber, 1962). This tells the story of the Earth's first encounter with the Angels, and how a treaty was negotiated with them, in much greater detail than I could summarize it in Mission to the Heart Stars. It was another of science fiction's masters, Lester del Rey, who suggested to me after reading The Star Dwellers that the alliance between the Angels and the Earth might well be more powerful than my central galactic federation - a lovely idea, and one that could be wedded usefully to my then rather hazy plan to explore the future of freedom in a high-energy culture. I'm much indebted - as often before - to both of these romantically named colleagues.
Finally, I have found two comments in the scholarly quarterly that 'fell into my hands' that seem to belong here -at least, they don't belong in the body of the novel.
One of these is a complaint by Aldous Huxley, who asked the conference what a man of letters might do about the problem of technology confronting us. He added: 'The rational side of man, with its scientific and technological expressions, gets little literary space. It is curious that science and technology have always occupied so small a place in literature ... This is all the more extraordinary when one considers that literature is supposed to hold the mirror up to life. In life, people spend a great deal of time involved in the technology of the period in which they live. They work, and their jobs are connected with technology and the organizations technology engenders. Yet one sees little evidence of this in literature.'
I find this an exceedingly depressing remark coming from an author who made one of his earliest successes - both critical and popular - with a science-fiction novel, Brave New World, devoted almost entirely to the future of the technological explosion, and who has written often about it since. Science fiction has always been pre-eminently the literature of the impact of science and technology, present and possible, upon the lives of those who have to work with it or upon whom, in many instances, it is inflicted. If, for reasons of literary quality or any other reasons which may have occurred to him, Mr Huxley chose to ignore the millions of words of magazine science fiction that have been published since 1926, that's entirely his affair; but he was, after all, an ex-countryman of H. G. Wells, who can't be said to have ignored the problem either, and who has had many distinguished successors.
I feel a little encouraged in my present project, even though it raises many more questions than it answers, by the second of the two comments. This turned out to be the very last words spoken at the Britannica conference. They are by Ralph W. Tyler, who said: 'We wish to leave both a fruitful world and difficult problems for posterity to deal with, and in so doing achieve more nearly for them their human potential. If we solve the problems for our children, they will not grow.'
That, though I didn't know it before, is both my excuse for this book and for the inordinate length of this Foreword.
James Blish 202 Riverside Drive New York, NY 10025

CHAPTER ONE
Fear and Flight
It was Jack Loftus's watch when the Ariadne grounded on Phobos, the innermost of the two moons of Mars.
The first thing he did was to lock the slim, wasp-waisted little cruiser firmly to the jagged rocky face of the satellite, for Phobos has no gravity worth mentioning; it is only five miles in diameter.
Besides, it is hollow. It was that oddity which enabled Jack to moor the Ariadne to it, for he knew that only two thousand feet below the rock's surface, there was a sheet of atomically pure steel into which the Ariadne's field could set its invisible teeth. Ordinarily that magnetic field was used only in space, to secure the footing of anyone who might want to venture out on to the hull in a space suit to make repairs. But atomically pure steel is theoretically the most sensitive of all known substances to magnetism - theoretically, because no human being had yet succeeded in making more than a few needles of it. The inner lining of Phobos had been made by... someone else.
The next thing Jack should have done was to have called Dr Howard Langer, the Ariadne's master. Dr Langer was not even asleep. As a matter of fact, he was playing a stiff game of double Klondike with his cadet understudy, Jerry 'Sandbag' Stevens, in the airlock, the only chamber aboard ship large enough to accommodate two men sitting facing each other across a lapboard.
But Jack did not call him yet. There was no particular hurry, and besides, Jack wanted to look at Mars.
Less than a year ago, Jack had been scores of light years away from his home sun, in the heart of the Greater Coal Sack nebula; but he had never touched down upon any of Sol's own family of planets except Earth itself. The expedition to the Coal Sack had been his first trip into space, and this mission to Phobos was his second.
Mars loomed before him, filling the whole field of view. Actually, of course, the planet was above him, but the Ariadne's skin was unbroken by portholes; vision outside, in any direction, was provided by a sextet of television screens, all at eye level. The vast landscape, only 3,700 miles away, moved majestically across the screen in what seemed to be the wrong direction, for Phobos moves so rapidly through the Martian skies that it rises in the west and sets in the east. Like most of the many moons with which the planets are provided, Phobos goes around Mars in the same direction as the red world rotates, but it goes a great deal faster. The day, on Mars, is twenty-four hours and thirty-seven minutes long, but Phobos has started on its third circuit of the planet by the time that day is over.
The landscape was complex and difficult to make sense of, even over this short a distance. It was summer in the equatorial latitudes over which Phobos was speeding, and the steady, dull ochre of the Martian deserts had given way to broad areas of deep blue-green, some of them almost as big as Australia but with much more diffuse boundaries. The colour was provided by the lichens - a wedding between a fungus and a one-celled alga, the only vegetation which had been able to survive the long dying of a once verdant world.
Stitching together the blue-green pseudo-continents was the elaborate network of the 'canals', which were, alas, not canals at all. If they had turned out to be real, water-carrying canals, Jack would not have been on Phobos now, and, in fact, the whole history of the Earth might have been entirely different.
It had been the Italian astronomer, Schiaparelli, Jack remembered somewhat dimly, who had first seen these strange markings and had dubbed them canali, by which he meant 'channels'. The words, however, passed unchanged into English as canals', and the American astronomer, Percival Lowell, later decided that the markings must be the final titanic effort of a race of intelligent beings to provide water to a planet becoming increasingly arid. It was a poetic concept, but very few of Lowell's colleagues could be found to agree to it, in part because most of them simply could not see, through the telescope, more than a few of the hundreds of lines Lowell drew upon his maps of Mars. Some of his confreres were so rude as to suggest that Lowell couldn't see them, either.
When the age of space flight arrived a century ago, Lowell was partly vindicated. His maps of the network turned out to be nearly eighty per cent accurate; his must have been one of the sharpest pairs of eyes since Tycho Brahe's. But the reality behind the lines was far stranger than anything that Lowell or his few supporters had imagined ... stranger -and far more tragic.
About this, Lowell had turned out to be both right and wrong at once. The lines were not canals. But they should have been.
There had indeed been a race of sentient Martians, and more than half a million years ago, they had foreseen -exactly as Lowell had imagined - that their world, which was too small to hold on to the oxygen and the water that had been given it at its creation, was doomed unless something was done. What the Martians chose to do might have been called an act of insanity but for the many precedents for it in the history of Earth. They did not build canals. Instead, they used all the accumulated scientific knowledge of their ancient race, which had reached its peak of civilization long before human beings had learned the use of fire, to lay out, over the whole face of Mars, something which their surviving records referred to as 'the Diagram of Power'.
Though the archaeologists could not be entirely sure after the passage of so many millennia, the significance of the Diagram appeared to be religious, even magical. It was perhaps a little like a horoscope, but one intended to freeze the future rather than to predict it. The construction of the total Inscription took three Martian centuries - twelve hundred years in Earth time - and drained the last energies and resources of the dying race.
Afterwards, the oxygen and the water vapour continued to leak away from Mars into space, and in a very short time, as geological periods go, the planet was a desert; but by that time there were no Martians left to mourn it.
The verdict had to be: Suicide through superstition. But Earthmen were in no position to condemn it. They had only to look back at the Pyramids of Egypt to see its like.
Other eyes, however, had been watching the whole of the tragedy as it happened. Their owners did not hesitate to condemn; nor did they bother to help. Those eyes, hidden within the heart of Phobos, had recorded the drama without a hint of emotion, and, an almost unthinkable distance away, the brains behind the eyes had icily decided that the Martians should be allowed to die by their own hands. It was not the first time - not by many hundreds - that those brains had come to a similar decision. Now they were thinking about the Earth...
'What are you thinking about?' a voice behind Jack said suddenly.
Jack started and swung around in the pilot's seat. The voice, of course, was that of Dr Langer, who stood in the entranceway to the control cabin, smiling a little wryly.
'I'm sorry, sir. I've never been this close to Mars before. I guess I was feeling a little overwhelmed.'
'Small wonder,' Dr Langer said. 'That wasteland down there is a monument to an immense and terrible history. The Earth has nothing to match it, and let's pray that it never will. Are you sure that that's all that was on your mind? I think this is the very first time I've ever caught you asleep at the switch.'
'No, sir,' Jack confessed. 'I was thinking about the - the arrogance of this interstellar federation or whatever it is, those people in the centre of the galaxy who hollowed out Phobos to spy on the Martians, and then let them die without so much as a sympathy card. All at once it made me mad. I still don't agree with what we're supposed to be up to here - doggone it, I think the whole idea is crazy - but I think I'm beginning to understand it better.'
'Go back three spaces,' Langer said gently. 'We don't know that Phobos never communicated with the Martians. I think the chances are very good that it did. Bear in mind that the observer asteroid that's watching us tried to talk to us as far back as 1935. We didn't recognize the signals then, and since then we've chosen not to - we've just been eavesdropping. The Martians may have made a very similar decision. After all, they must have known what Phobos was -they had had space travel for many thousands of years before they began to lay out the Diagram of Power. Look at what they built on the back of our own Moon.'
'The Death Machine?'
'That's what we call it. But remember, we don't know what it was actually for. We only gave it that name because it was so deadly to explore, but that's almost surely a - well, call it a side-effect. No, I think it's almost certain that the Martians knew that help was available, if they were willing to ask for it. But they didn't. They were committed to suicide, and once the Heart Stars saw that, they didn't try to intervene any further. After all, they had seen it all happen before, hundreds and hundreds of times.'
'We wouldn't have let it happen,' Jack said stubbornly.
'No,' Langer said, seating himself in the navigator's chair next to Jack, 'but we aren't a million years old, either. Our standards of compassion may be wrong, or at least may be inferior to some over-riding moral standard of which we can have no conception. That's not something that I like to think about, but then, there are lots of things in the universe that I don't like very much. Nevertheless, I have to learn to live with them. The Martians didn't. Down there, you see -the results: a universal desert, covered with meaningless scribblings.'
Jack continued to stare at the slowly processing, colourful map for a long moment. He said at last: 'Well, all right. But all the same, Dr Langer, I'm scared. I don't want to meet anybody who could pass judgment on a whole planet like that, no matter how much smarter they are than I am. But that's what we've got to do.'
'I'm scared, too,' Langer said surprisingly. 'I never thought that I would have to meet the problem of the Heart Stars in my lifetime. After all, the Angels tell us that we have fifty thousand years of grace to go before these Galactics -or whatever they call themselves - pass judgment upon the Earth. But, there's no help for it. Suit up, Jack. We had better get on the job. I'm leaving Jerry in charge of the ship.'
Jack got up obediently, but Dr Langer, in an unprecedented moment of indecision, remained seated, staring at the vivid, glowing landscape of dead Mars. Then he shut the screen off and swung away from it.
'From now on we're going to have to watch our steps,' he said sombrely. 'Do you know the name of this little rockball we're on, Jack?'
'Sure.'