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

'No, I mean the real name. What does Phobos mean?'
'Why -I guess I don't know.'
'Deimos and Phobos were the names of the two horses that pulled the chariot of Mars, the god of War,' Dr Langer said. 'The names were the Greek words for flight and fear. This is Fear we're about to explore. I'm afraid it was well named.'

CHAPTER TWO
The Hollow Moon
Jack could no longer say with any certainty just when this adventure might have begun. Sometimes it seemed to him that it ought to be dated back to that day in California when, while still a senior in high school, he had definitely decided to become a foreign service cadet, or at least to the day when he had been notified that he had passed the competitive examinations at Vallejo. Sometimes it seemed more sensible to date it to the day, a little over two years later, when he had been apprenticed to Daniel Hart, the United States Secretary for Space, whom Dr Langer served as trouble-shooter.
But actually, their presence on Phobos was essentially an outcome of the discovery of the Angels - creatures of pure energy, rather like living ball-lightning - whose natural habitat was space, particularly those turbulent regions like the Orion nebula and the Coal Sacks where new stars were being formed. They were exquisitely beautiful, these shimmering, fiery creatures, highly intelligent and even playful. Yet they were awesome, too, considering that the youngest were some four million years old, and the oldest possibly had participated in the First Cause which had given birth to the whole universe.
Dr Langer, Jack, and Sandbag had gone to the Greater Coal Sack nebula in the Ariadne, charged with the responsibility of negotiating a treaty with the Angels, a responsibility which, through a combination of danger, accident, and bad judgment, had devolved largely upon Jack. Somehow he had managed to bring it off. The treaty had been signed, and there were some hundreds of cadet Angels on the Earth at the moment, including a friend of Jack's whom he had named HESPERUS.
Most of them were helping to run hydrogen fusion reactors. They did this from inside, for the unthinkably furious nuclear processes by which the stars shine were as familiar and natural to them as breathing.
The Angels had long been aware of the federation of stable civilizations that occupied the centre of the galaxy and had been in contact with it. Essentially, however, they were indifferent to it, for to them even this million-year-old interstellar society was ephemeral compared to the Angels themselves. They also knew, of course, that the Heart Stars had given the Earth a hundred thousand years to prove itself stable enough as a society to be worthy of being invited to join the galactic federation, and to them it probably seemed a reasonable test period. Nevertheless, they had been sufficiently impressed by the mature way in which the Earth-men had conducted themselves during the negotiations leading towards the treaty to recommend to the Heart Stars that the trial period be cut in half - a recommendation that would almost surely be accepted, since not even the accumulated might and wisdom of the Heart Stars could hope for an instant to survive the active displeasure of the Angels, who were masters of the energies of Creation itself.
It was at this point that politics entered the picture. It would never have occurred to the Angels that, to Man, fifty thousand years would still seem an intolerably long time. Yet it was, after all, more than five times as long as the whole of Man's recorded history. On the other hand, it was bound to occur to someone on Earth that the relationship between the Earth and the Heart Stars had, in fact, changed even more drastically: that, by virtue of its alliance with the Angels, the Earth might now be actually more powerful than the Heart Stars - or could be made to seem so.
Jack did not know exactly which high Earth official had come to this dangerous conclusion, though it was clear to him that it had to be someone in the United Nations Secretariat, perhaps the Secretary-General himself, unlike Secretary Nilssen though it sounded. He did know, because Secretary Hart had told him, that Hart had argued firmly against the notion. Hart had thought it not only foolhardy, but in violation of the spirit of the treaty with the Angels.
But Secretary Hart had been overruled. Once broached, the idea that it might be possible to gatecrash the smug, coldly aloof, apparently invulnerable galactic federation by a show of force proved to be irresistible to those in whose hands the decision rested, whoever they were. It seemed a grand opportunity to show the Heart Stars that, though the Earth was only an ordinary planet of a minor sun swimming far out in a backwater of the galaxy and the people of Earth were barely out of the cradle from the point of view of galactic history, the Heart Stars could patronize the human race only at their peril.
The whole idea was a colossal piece of presumption loaded with unknowns, every one of which was a possibility for disaster. It was clear that its sponsors knew this, clear first of all from the great care that they had taken to preserve their anonymity and to conceal the whole course of action from the public, and even from the middle echelons of government. It became more abundantly clear from the set of instructions which had been given - through a reluctant, indeed a rebellious, Secretary Hart - to Dr Langer.
He had been told to determine, as quietly as possible, just how strong a combination of the Earth and the Angels might be against the Heart Stars, preferably without letting the Heart Stars suspect that any such question had even been raised. How he went about it was up to him, but there was the limiting proviso that he keep the budget well under two million dollars so as not to alert the General Assembly -let alone the public - that this might in time become a major project. The orders did not say this explicitly. It was, after all, the public's two million dollars. It was anticipated, the orders said instead, that Dr Langer would hold down staff expenses during this preliminary phase of the investigation by recourse to the cadet system.
This veiled directive explained the presence of Sandbag Stevens on Phobos. It did not quite explain Jack's; he was, after all, Secretary Hart's understudy, not Dr Langer's. But the fact that they were on Phobos at all was much easier to explain. They were about to explore the strength of the Heart Stars through the major instrument that that vast federation had made accessible to the solar system in which men lived: the observer satellite that it had built to monitor the Martians and which still whirled intact around the dying planet's equator, no higher up from the surface than the distance between New York and San Francisco.
The inside of Phobos had often been explored before. The difference, this time, was that Dr Langer was authorized to break silence, if he judged that necessary, and let the Heart Stars know that Earth was looking back at them.
By the tangerine-coloured light of Mars, Jack followed Dr Langer over the surface of Phobos. There were no landmarks in this jumbled wilderness of rock, but Dr Langer seemed to know exactly where he was going; perhaps he was following some sort of radio beacon. One thing was certain, however. It would be very difficult to become lost on Phobos, for the total surface area was about the size of a California truck farm, and besides, if one kept on walking in a straight line, one could completely circumnavigate the little body in under three hours. To find the Ariadne not even this would be necessary, for, since Phobos always kept the same face turned towards Mars, there would be no need to bother stumbling around on the dark side of the moonlet. All the same, Phobos was a gloomy and disquieting place, and Jack would have been glad to be somewhere else ... even back at Vallejo.
Dr Langer stopped and raised an arm, the Mars light running in glistening lines along the metal fabric of the space suit. When Jack had closed the gap between them, he found the troubleshooter peering down into a perfectly round hole, about eighteen feet in diameter, which seemed to have smooth-polished rock walls; the bottom of the shaft was not visible.
'Is this it?' Jack said, almost whispering without being aware of it.
'Yes. Not very impressive, is it? But try throwing a stone at it.'
'Do you mean it?' Jack said.
'Sure. Try it.' Langer's voice chuckled drily. 'Things are not always what they seem. Especially not here.'
Jack bent and picked up a sizable boulder - with no effort, for although the thing was almost half as big as he was, it weighed only a few ounces despite its mass - and shoved it away from him at the mouth of the shaft. It was a fair throw and the boulder sailed gently almost into the centre of the opening.
Then, with slow, absurd solemnity, it bounced - off nothing at all - and went sailing away towards the horizon. It was quite possible that Jack's shove had pushed it past Phobos's velocity of escape, in which case it would never come down - at least, not down on Phobos, though it might well strike Mars in a year or so.
'Oh,' Jack said, a little dazed. 'Then that hole's an airlock, after all. How do we get in?'
'We walk in,' Dr Langer said. 'Nobody knows exactly how they did it, but the field there is set to admit life-forms above a certain level of neural organization, even if they're enclosed in space suits or other non-living cans. I remember the films of the attempt to drop a Peking duck down that hole. It was in a spherical capsule, mostly transparent, so you could see it quacking wildly away even though you couldn't hear a thing. But the capsule wouldn't go through the field, and when we tried to have a man carry it down, the man went down, all right, but the duck capsule bobbed right back up again like a cork. On the other hand, the field passed a cat without any difficulty - except for the trouble we had getting it back.' He laughed very briefly. 'Well, here we go.'
Taking Jack's arm, Dr Langer led the rather reluctant cadet out on to the invisible lens that guarded the airlock. Jack did not know exactly what he had expected - perhaps a completely smooth surface, like oiled glass or a field of ice -but in fact the lens, whatever it was, seemed to afford quite a good grip for his boots. As they approached the centre of the pit, however, the going began to become steadily more tacky, as though he were walking in a puddle of increasingly thickening syrup. And at the very centre, Jack found it impossible to move his feet in any direction more than a few inches before the field seized them again and returned them to immobility.
At the same time, Jack noticed uneasily that the rim of the black orifice was slowly rising around them.
It was a distinctly uncomfortable sensation, all too suggestive of being swallowed. Soon Dr Langer and Jack were sinking into the shaft faster and faster, much faster than could be accounted for by Phobos's feeble gravity, and the opening on the surface was only a dwindling orange disc, stippled with blue mould, far above their heads.
'How fast are we going?' Jack said.
'Only about ten feet per second as best I can judge. But bear in mind that I've never been here before, either. I have to judge by Mars light, just as you do.'
Since there was no other source of light and the walls of the shaft continued to be absolutely smooth, it shortly became impossible to judge just how fast they were falling, or rather, how fast they were being drawn down.
'It makes me feel like Alice, falling down the White Rabbit's hole,' Langer's voice said inside the darkness of Jack's helmet. 'I keep wanting to look at my watch.'
This incongruous comparison, obviously intended to keep Jack's spirits up, actually did amuse him for a moment. But only a second later, he remembered that at the bottom of that hole in Alice in Wonderland, she had shed an ocean of tears.
Then a growing sensation of weight, again far beyond anything that could be accounted for by the gravity of Phobos, told him that they were decelerating. Almost at the same time, a dim glow began to suffuse upwards through the shaft. It was white light with a distinct greenish tinge to it, quite unlike the reflected desert sunlight of Mars, and yet quite unlike the artificial light that Jack was familiar with, to. The brighter it grew, the more unpleasant he found it.
He noticed also, with considerable surprise, that there was now a whisper of friction outside his suit. He glanced at the exterior pressure gauge inside his helmet. Sure enough - the pressure outside was already more than nine pounds per square inch and was still rising.
'Can we breathe down here, sir?'
'No, sir,' Langer said promptly. 'The atmosphere down here is more than ninety-nine per cent pure xenon. The rest of it is nitrogen, most of it in the free-radical state. It's an open question whether you would die faster of suffocation or of poisoning if you were to take a breath of it. We don't even dare work in here with respirators; the free radicals would attack the skin and even the fabric. Hello! Here we are.'
The soles of Jack's boots struck the bottom of the shaft with a barely perceptible jar. Dr Langer did not hesitate; he stepped out immediately into the subdued greenish-white light, beckoning Jack to follow.
The world into which the shaft opened was so strange as to be almost completely unintelligible. For one thing, it had no floor. From the exit platform of the shaft, which was merely a brief spur of rock, the walls curved gently again on all sides to invisibility. It was a gigantic cavern, apparently encompassing the whole interior of the moon.
Though it was illuminated, there was no way to tell where the light came from, and the light itself behaved in curious ways. Here and there, it gathered in glowing patches, like clouds of fog, and glowing streamers of it crossed the bands of darkness which lay between one patch and another. At the centre of each patch, hanging immobile in mid-space, was a shining geometrical solid; there a cube, there a trapezoid, there a polyhedral shape whose name Jack couldn't remember, there another whose name he had never known; their sizes were impossible to judge, because in this confusing chiaroscuro he could not tell how far away they were from him or from each other. All of them, however, were stitched together by a complex web work of rigid, brilliant lines of light - some ruby-red, some sapphire, some topaz - which were even more difficult to understand, because, although they could be plainly seen to be brighter than the drifting noctilucent clouds, they did not seem to contribute anything to the more general illumination. Some of them could also be seen to be pulsating rapidly, almost at the eye's limit of detection, but most of them looked quite steady.
'Don't let it buffalo you, Jack,' Dr Langer's radio voice said softly in his ears. 'Granted that it looks like nothing so much as an abstract painting, but actually it's not difficult to understand. Our technology ought to be up to duplicating it in about a century or perhaps even sooner. Though I can't say that the thought cheers me much.'
'I'm not exactly buffaloed,' Jack said, not entirely truthfully, 'but I am puzzled. What does it all mean?'
'Well, let's start with the light. The visible part of it is the least important, but the reason why even that is so unpleasant to the eyes is because it's heavily ionizing, the idea being to keep the nitrogen fraction of the gas here in a constant state of electrical conductivity.'
It was strange to hear Dr Langer talking so calmly, indeed so academically, on the flickering verge of mystery. But there was no doubt that it helped. The troubleshooter spoke again.
'There are no wires or cables anywhere inside Phobos. All the power is passed along by laser beams, those very tight lines of light you see crisscrossing the clouds of ionized gas. On a smaller scale, there's no wiring in the various individual components, either. Each component is a single crystal, chemically almost completely pure, with a circuit laid out inside it partly by a pattern of trace impurities, and partly by screw dislocations and other mechanical flaws in its molecular structure. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?'
'Sure - transistor circuitry. Dr Langer, I never did understand solid-state physics, but haven't we been doing that kind of thing since about 1975? You don't make the Heart Stars sound anything like a century ahead of us. They only sound like they're two or three years ahead of me, and that doesn't take much doing - not on this subject.'
'I guess them a century ahead of us because of the scale on which they've done it, Jack. Each one of those large blobs of metal that you see floating out there is a single crystal; the shapes tell you what kind of metal it is. Each one is atomically pure, except for the tiny impurities and dislocations which make it work. Compared to them, our transistor crystals are just seeds, while those there are the full-grown adults, and we can't grow them yet. As far as I know, we wouldn't even know how to begin.'