"Blish, James - Mission To The Heart Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)
Dr Langer looked down at the tessellated stone floor. To the Ss'podan, it must have seemed a gesture of submission, but Jack knew that behind Dr Langer's carefully neutral, harmless, kindly face, the most dangerous living Earth brain had gone into emergency overdrive. After only a moment, he raised his head.
'The inevitable must, of course, be faced honestly. I trust you will in turn honour our custom of communicating such decisions to our people. They represent no possible threat to you, as you know, but it would be intolerably impolite to desert them, as they would have to view it, without a word.'
'You cannot use our apparatus.'
'I know that. I desire to send one of my cadets to the Argo to transmit the message. The other cadet and I will remain below, as hostages for good behaviour.'
'Certainly. Designate one.'
The troubleshooter turned to Sandbag and spoke to him briefly in a language Jack not only didn't understand but couldn't identify. With a rueful grin, Sandbag responded with a single word, whereupon Dr Langer shifted gears. This time the language was obviously Latin, enabling Jack to guess that the first had been Greek, but beyond that he was not much better off than he had been before. His still usable knowledge of that language was entirely legal, not conversational. Sandbag, however, listened with a frown of concentration almost painful to behold, then nodded.
'What is that?' the Banish of Bane said sharply. 'You must not give instructions that I cannot understand.'
'My apologies, my Lord of Bane. That is what we call the Ritual of Farewell, for which that language is reserved. I was explaining to my cadet which form of the ritual seems most suitable for this unprecedented situation. For the rest, Jerry, you need only take the gig aloft to the Argo, send out our problem and our decision, speak the poem and come back here. We have no other choice.'
True,' Baxx Terr said indulgently. 'This ritual is touching. You may proceed.'
Sandbag bowed and went out. Only Jack and Dr Langer could have detected the glitter of mischief in his eyes. Dr Langer's lie, Jack thought, was a truly lovely one, perfectly calculated to appeal to the ceremony-ridden assumptions of Ss'pode. He would have felt happier about it, all the same, had he been able to understand more than a few words of what Dr Langer had actually said.
Nor did Dr Langer have a chance to talk to Jack in private thereafter; the Banish of Bane kept them to heel in his quarters until Sandbag's errand should be completed.
The end came in the midst of a conversation as meaningless as it was formal. Sandbag was re-admitted to the palace of the Banish, looking frighteningly grim and unable to convey to Dr Langer more than a fraction of how his errand had gone. Only minutes later, a prismatic object about the size and shape of an egg came floating through the air out of nowhere, nestled for a moment against Baxx Terr's temple, and vanished in a small puff of rainbows.
Baxx Terr's hands flew to his throat, and in the next instant he was tearing open the priceless work of art that was his garment. The material of which it was made had been engineered to last a lifetime. As it tore, it also tore his hands, but he did not even seem to feel it.
'So this is the nature of your loyalty!' he said, in a voice white with fury and anguish. 'Not only do you run away -but you do so to our harm! You have by your thanklessness increased our taxes fivefold! Go at once - go! go!'
Behind the mask, his eyes glistened so alarmingly that the three Earthmen lost no time in seizing their advantage. Jack's last impression of the doomed aristocrat was the rent, blood-dappled shirt, which revealed the fact that the sponsor they had decided arbitrarily to think of as 'he' was indeed a male. Jack had suspected otherwise for so long that the surprise temporarily knocked all of his more urgent questions quite out of his mind.
Not so Dr Langer. 'What was the answer?' he said the minute the gig was safely out of Ss'pode's atmosphere. 'Obviously it worked, but Jerry, you look far from happy about it.'
'Baxx Terr was right. We may get where we're going but we're not going to like it when we get there,' Sandbag said, staring straight ahead. 'I had no trouble reaching the Hegemony, or explaining that the Ss'podans were holding us up. But I'd only got about three sentences into the story when there was a real blast from the other end. Doctor Langer, whoever it was that I was talking to, he's a devil - a monster -I can't come up with any word to tell you about that voice. A five hundred per cent increase in military assessments is only the beginning of what's going to happen to Ss'pode. They're going to be paying for this trick for ever!'
'Jerry, are you sure? I'm sorry you were put on the spot, but isn't it possible that you're exaggerating?'
'I kept tapes,' Sandbag said. 'You listen to them, sir, and then tell me. I hated those zoo keepers, but I wouldn't have wished this on them. But that's only part of it. We're going to pay for the trick, too. Our orders are to drop all the other stops we had scheduled and go directly to the Heart world of the Hegemony - at whatever hardship. And Doctor Langer, we've got almost no food. I haven't had a chance yet to ask the computer for an inventory, but we've been eating out of our own stores all the time we've been on Ss'pode and getting nothing back. When I tried to tell the guy that, do you know what he did?'
'Calm down a bit, Jerry. Evidently he wouldn't listen. We ought to be used to that by now.'
'He listened,' Sandbag said. 'And then he laughed at me.'
Very, very slowly Dr Langer's eyes closed.
'Oho,' he said, almost in a whisper. 'Well, well. You know - suddenly I'm a little out of patience with the Heart Stars myself.'
'Me, too,' Jack said, when he could get his jaw muscles unclenched. 'But, sir - what do we do?'
The joke did not raise even the faintest of cheers. Dr Langer grinned crookedly at the failure.
'It looks bad, I know,' he said. 'But we have learned something of enormous value: there is no hierarchy in the Heart Stars! Ss'pode is a slave planet, and so are they all. The Hegemony is an absolute dictatorship. We need to go directly to its home planet, and this incident has given us just the excuse that we need to do that - with the dictatorship's own approval. And somehow, in some way, we are going to do it.'
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Heart of the Hegemony
There was no way of minimizing the length of that journey, let alone ignoring it. In the first place, the distances were prodigious beyond imagination, even with the aid of the Haertel drive. That the trip was possible at all - and it was only just barely possible - was due largely to just three factors:
First: the abundance of hydrogen, the fuel upon which the Nernst generator fed, everywhere in the universe, even in the spaces between the stars;
Second: the fact that no molecule of water ever left the Argo; it was constantly recycled and reclaimed, even from human wastes, a requirement of all forms of manned space flight so absolute that it had not so much as raised an eyebrow for more than seventy-five years;
Third: the ship's colony of Chlorella, the blue-green alga housed in many miles of transparent plastic tubing in what used to be the hold of the Argo, irradiated by fluorescent lamps and constantly in circulation in the nutrient bath in which it grew. The primary function of these uncountable millions of microscopic, one-celled plants was to renew the ship's oxygen and remove the carbon dioxide produced in breathing by Dr Langer and the cadets, but they could also be eaten, for the plant would vary its production of proteins and carbohydrates dutifully in accordance with whatever nutrients were added to its bath. No one really enjoyed eating it, for no matter how it was dried, processed and seasoned, it had a persistently, monotonously fishy taste. But for by far the larger part of the journey, it was the only reason that they were not starving.
But there was no way to compensate for time. Though the trip was, objectively, slightly shorter than several of the earliest rocket-powered interplanetary trips, in many respects it was much worse. To begin with, on the Standing Wave they were cut off from all possible contact with home or with any other source of messages. Indeed, they were cut off from the universe outside, whether sensate or inanimate; they could not even see the stars. In addition, there were only three of them. After all, that epic five-year-long expedition to the Jovian moon of Ganymede - it still held the record as the longest continuous space flight of any kind - had been made by a fleet of ships, comprising altogether more than two hundred men. The ships had always been in communication with each other and, in addition, the voyage had been enlivened - though the word is somewhat callous, it is accurate - by a series of small and large disasters en route. It was, in short, anything but dull.
The passage from Ss'pode to Malis was unspeakably, excruciatingly dull. Dr Langer and the cadets passed a small fraction of the time playing chess, reading, listening to tapes, holding jury-rigged classes, and arguing with each other, not only about what might be facing them at the end of the trip, but also on every subject upon which they could possibly dredge up a difference of opinion.
Early on, the arguments between the cadets began to grow acrimonious, not only because their personalities differed sharply, but because a good, angry shouting match at least temporarily relieved the boredom. At the moment before this self-stimulated anger turned into abiding, irrational enmity, Dr Langer separated the contestants by shifts and forbade them even to see each other for a solid month, at the end of which time they both bitterly hated Dr Langer and were almost childishly delighted to see each other once the restriction was lifted. Not even the impulsive Sandbag had any difficulty in drawing the moral, and thereafter the arguments among all three of them were increasingly conducted under the protective shield of a feeling of human solidarity against the encroaching loneliness and isolation.
Somewhere along the line, too, they came to need the arguments less and less, as each cadet in his own way discovered some of the negative beauties of silence. During the latter half of the trip, a whole week would sometimes pass without more than a few words being exchanged among the three of them, yet without the slightest feeling of unfriendliness - indeed, quite the contrary. The discussions that followed these long periods of withdrawal into the labyrinths inside their own skulls were so rewarding that each succeeding period of silence was longer, as the cadets formed the habit of thinking through more and more intensively the implications of what had been said and of the positions that they had taken. As this three-way intellectual exchange matured, inch by inch, Dr Langer lectured the cadets less and less; he thought more and more about the opinions that they offered him.
Though Jack had never thought of himself as being very talkative, particularly when compared to Sandbag's good-humoured glibness, the process gradually forced upon him the conviction that almost everything he had said in his life up to now had been mostly a waste of breath. Some of this had been showing off in an attempt to impress others with the notion that he already knew what they were trying to tell him. He was appalled now to think how often he had finished others' sentences for them, losing, in his rude eagerness, whatever point they had been hoping to make. Even worse had been the compulsive chatter, good only for convincing himself that he really existed in a world and a civilization thousands and thousands of years older than he could ever hope to be or ever hope to understand in its entirety.
He tried, not without pain, to explain some of this to Dr Langer. But the troubleshooter didn't help him, except to listen with an intent seriousness, punctuated just once by a slight nod. At the end, it was Sandbag who summed it up.
'I think,' he said hesitantly, 'that there's something in the Bible about this. I wish I could quote it exactly, but it's only one of hundreds of lines in the Book that I wish I had exactly right and don't.'
'The Bible is as hard to remember verbatim as a thesaurus of familiar quotations,' Dr Langer said quietly, 'and for very much the same reasons. Go ahead anyhow, Jerry, please.'
'Well then ... it says that, approximately: "He who darkens counsel without knowledge isn't earning his keep." Isn't that what you mean, Jack?'
'Yes. And I remember the line, too, just as vaguely. It never meant anything to me before. Doctor Langer, what real good is written wisdom when we can't understand it until after we come to the same conclusions ourselves through our own experience?'
'Not very much good, in my opinion,' Dr Langer admitted. 'Written wisdom, it has always seemed to me, is like an algebraic formula: it states the general case as elegantly as possible, but all the terms in the equation are parameters which you must fill specifically in terms of your own experience. You need to have led a rich and thoughtful life before the formula becomes applicable to you. If you are, in addition, especially thoughtful, you may in the long run be able to refine the formula itself. But that doesn't happen very often. It's a noble ambition, though, I think.'
'Is it yours, sir?'
'Yes, Jack, it is. Otherwise, I have no excuse for having spent my life dashing from planetary pillar to stellar post -I have no interest in action for its own sake. I'd be sitting happily at home, watching three-V, brushing up on my cooking, and cherishing my children.'
Of all the surprises that Dr Langer had sprung on him in the past three years, this now seemed to Jack to be the most stunning. He had never before known that Dr Langer was even married.
When the long jump from Ss'pode to Malis had begun, Jack had been on the down side of eighteen years old. When the alarm exploded and the Argo came off the Standing Wave, he had turned twenty. But it felt much more like eighty.
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