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

The huge, cubist spectacle began to make a little more sense. Nevertheless, it seemed to Jack that there was nothing that a human being could do with it but look at it, exactly as though it really were a painting. After all, they were still stuck on this spur of rock.
'All the same, I don't see how anybody ever figured out what any part of this actually does. Where do we go from here, Dr Langer?'
'We have to get to the centre. There's a control room there. Luckily, it's simple to do, though quite a few lives were lost figuring it out. Follow me, Jack, follow me very exactly.'
Dr Langer's space-suited figure walked slowly out to the pointed tip of the rock spur. As he moved, a nimbus of the greenish-white fog gathered around him, until at the very tip of the spur he was enveloped in a fuzzy-edged ball of it. Without hesitation, he stepped off into the glowing ambiguity of the interior of Phobos.
The ball of light swept him away. It ducked and dodged so that Jack could not tell anything about its real path, but it was certainly moving rapidly. Within less than a minute, it and its passenger were out of sight.
Trying without success to swallow his heart, Jack marched to the tip of the spur and stepped off after him.
There was no sensation of movement. Instead, the lines of colour, the puffballs of fog, and the geometrical solids whirled, dipped and revolved around him as though he were seated calmly at a three-dimensional movie, although one which made no sense. Nevertheless, he began to suspect that the course along which he was being taken followed strict laws. Though it never once touched any of the hair-thin laser lines or even fringed upon the blurs of light which glowed around the geometrical solids, its orbit was growing smaller and smaller. Clearly it was indeed approaching the centre of Phobos, rather like an orbiting magnetic field which tacks back into the solar wind, no matter how often or how gravely deflected by the magnetic fields of the planets.
The field veered sharply, and the central 'sun' of Phobos came hurtling into view. It was a burnished golden ball, just as featureless as all the rest of the floating metal objects. As it swung towards him, however, he had the momentary impression that its surface was engraved with a myriad of very fine, complexly interwoven lines, almost like a map of the Diagram of Power below on unseen nearby Mars. Then there was an explosion of green-white light, and after Jack was no longer dazzled, he found himself standing next to Dr Langer in a humming, shifting room so meaningless that, at his very first glimpse of it, he began to feel dizzy and hypnotized.
'Close your eyes,' Dr Langer's voice said. 'And don't move. It will settle down in a minute.'
Jack closed his eyes again just in time, but the after-image remained on his retinas longer than he liked. If it could be trusted, that whole room was made of illuminated Jacob's Ladders, all in constant motion.
'Okay,' Dr Langer said. Jack opened his eyes reluctantly. The control room was indeed a mosaic of small squares of coloured light, but at least they weren't moving any more.
'Induction switches, colour coded,' Dr Langer explained. 'Touch one and nothing happens, but if you know the combinations, you can run the whole place.'
'Do you know them?'
'I know about ten. The experts on the station know maybe two hundred, out of several hundred thousand possibilities,' Dr Langer said. 'Five of the ten I know are for shutting Phobos down entirely. At least we think they are, but I have no intention of trying them out. One, we believe, is an emergency escape route, though we don't know where it leads. Of the remaining four, one starts a galactic model or map - I'd call it a planetarium if the term weren't so ridiculously inadequate for a construction made to this scale -and that's what I want you to see now.'
The fingers of his right gauntlet moved in a zigzag pattern over the coloured squares of the wall nearest him. Instantly, the control room went black.

CHAPTER THREE
The Commitment
At first Jack could see nothing, but gradually he became aware of a ghostly white glow floating before him, a ball of dim light about as big as he was, though size was again very difficult to estimate in the surrounding darkness.
Dr Langer's voice said calmly: 'I'm going to have to explain this, because it's not going to look like any picture of a galaxy that you ever saw. All those were long-exposure photographs, at the mercy of the brightest objects in their fields of view, whereas this is not a photograph but a map. And the mapping conventions involved are for convenience, not necessarily for realism. It won't look any more like a real galaxy than a terrestrial globe looks like the real Earth.'
'That ball is supposed to be our galaxy?' Jack said wonderingly. 'I thought it was supposed to be a flat spiral, like most of the rest.'
'Well, that's exactly what I meant. No possible photograph can show you that all the so-called spiral galaxies are actually spherical, but they are. Another thing: this is an evolving demonstration, and it goes at its own pace, which I can't control. So you'd better just let me talk and save questions for afterward.'
'Okay.'
'The ball of light that you see shows only one class of elements of the galaxy. Each point of light in it represents a star cluster, a tight globular cluster of about a hundred thousand Population One stars, each cluster about three hundred light years in diameter. As you can see, these clusters are scattered very evenly throughout the galactic sphere, not concentrated in a central disc as most Population Two stars are. You've probably seen photographs of the great cluster in Hercules. That's like the others, not in the so-called galactic plane but outside it, but it happens to be the nearest one to us. The whole ball is about a hundred thousand light years in diameter, which is about standard for a major galaxy; there are many smaller ones, but hardly any larger.'
As he finished, the misty sphere was slowly bisected by a thin black line. Jack could not resist exclaiming, 'And there's the galactic plane!'
'Yes, but actually it's the galactic equator; the plane doesn't show yet. In this case, it's not just a mapping convention but a real thing, as you'll see in a minute. Notice that there's beginning to be a glow in the centre of the sphere, and that it, too, is shaping up into a sphere, about a fifth as big as the one around it. What's happened is that the map has now added all the individual Population One stars in the galaxy, in addition to those that are gathered into clusters. There are so many of them and they're so close together - about a light year apart, on the average - that they comprise a supercluster of their own, about twenty thousand light years in diameter.'
Despite the fact that Dr Langer was obviously pacing himself to the development of the model, he fell silent for a moment and let the image continue to change for many precious seconds. At last he spoke sombrely.
Those are the Heart Stars.'
The sphere of the Heart Stars continued to brighten and seemed to become still larger. At the same time, it changed shape, from a sphere into a spindle whose blunt points crept outward along the galactic equator on both sides. Dr Langer added quickly, 'Now the map adds all the Population Two stars in the galaxy - the stars that were formed later, after most of the material of which the galaxy was made had already contracted into the central disc.'
With the words, the spindle brightened into a tremendous lens, reaching from one side of the great sphere to the other along the equator. The equator itself, however, was no longer simply a line but a thick band of fuzzy darkness, like a streak of greasy smoke.
'As you can see, we still have plenty of dust left over to make more Population Two stars, and plenty of hydrogen, too, although the map doesn't bother to show it. Nor is it all concentrated around the rim of the disc; but I don't have to tell you that, because you were in the Greater Coal Sack nebula with me, and that's well inside the rim, near our own sun. Great rivers of it run inward towards the Heart Stars between the spiral arms. And now, here we go to visualize them.'
The globe of star clusters faded out, leaving nothing behind but the elongated lens with its ominous bar of blackness running around its rim. Slowly, the near edge of the lens began to move downwards, tilting the whole central disc steadily towards them. Now Jack could see that the rim of dust and debris did indeed run inward towards the Heart Stars at regular intervals, carving out dark spiral markings upon the surface of the disc. It was a revelation to him.
In the photographs he had seen of spiral galaxies, he had always assumed that it was the stars that were distributed in spiral arms, separated by relatively empty space. But now it was perfectly clear that the distribution of the stars in the disc was more or less regular, and that it was rivers of dust and gas that created the dark areas which divided them. Those spiral stripings were the Creator's sign that He had not finished with this galaxy yet, and when all the remaining raw material was used up, the Milky Way would be only a featureless disc seen from above, an equally featureless ellipsoid seen edge on. There were already many such galaxies scattered through the visible universe.
When that unthinkably remote day came, Jack thought dazedly, the Milky Way would not be half so beautiful as it was now, in the full flower of its prime.
On the map, the globe of star clusters had completely vanished, and there remained facing him only the incredible whirlpool of stars which was his most familiar picture of a galaxy of this type. No man had ever seen one whole with the naked eye, and no man ever would. Conversely, no photograph - and Jack had seen scores of spectacular ones, most of them made with the 64-inch telescope of Richardson Observatory on the Moon - could ever convey the glories shown by this map which eliminated all irrelevancies, such as intervening stars, and showed you what was, not just what it was possible to see.
Some distance beyond the run, seemingly continuing the outermost of the spiral arms but not connected to it, were two hazy objects. One, the closest to the run, was only a shapeless blob of haze, less than half as big as the galactic core. The farther one, however, was quite as big as the core and, furthermore, it showed traces of structure. It looked like a miniature of that class of galaxy known as the 'barred' spiral.
'Do galaxies have satellites, too?' Jack said.
'Most spirals do,' Dr Langer said. 'But they're cast off after eight or ten revolutions and become independent, which is why the so-called elliptical galaxies don't have them. Ours are unusually large, but otherwise quite typical. They're the Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds, which you can see with the naked eye from the southern hemisphere of Earth. The fact that you can see them from Earth tells you that our Sun is located almost immediately "under" them, in the adjacent spiral arm, well out from the centre of the galaxy. In just a moment the map will show you exactly where.'
There was a sharp piping sound inside Jack's helmet, and a point of red light appeared in the spiral arm immediately beside the Greater Cloud.
'The machinery here has picked up the frequency of our suit radios,' Dr Langer said, 'hence the sound. Something even more startling comes next.'
But the warning hardly prepared Jack for the reality. The map faded out and the room seemed to lighten; and then, came the voice.
'Good evening, Rangers,' it said pleasantly. 'This is Rogers, speaking for Captain Video.'
Jack's jaw fell open. He listened incredulously for more, but apparently there was to be no more.
'For Pete's sake!' he burst out. 'Is that - some kind of a joke?'
Dr Langer chuckled. 'No; that's the way it always opens. It shows you, incidentally, how the machine learned an Earth language, and why the language is English. It analysed the speech of a television broadcast that was obviously about space travel. Evidently it assumed that the people speaking that language actually had space travel and so were the most advanced.'
'But ... it was the Russians who were first. I'm sure of that.'
'Yes, but when that programme was popular - back when I was about six years old - nobody had space travel. It was fiction, a children's show. But it showed routine interstellar flight, and the machine here obviously took it to be fact at first. It knows better now, of course, but since no Earthman has ever answered it so far, it still preserves the opening as a form of address.'
'Can't it hear us now?' Jack objected.
'Surely, but we haven't notified it that we're addressing it. If you'll look to your left, you'll see that there's a single red panel glowing. To talk to the machine, we touch that Nobody ever has. You may do the honours, Jack.'
Jack swallowed. 'Do you think it's safe?'