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

'It's what we were sent here to do. I haven't the faintest idea whether it's safe or not. Probably not. Go ahead.'
Tentatively Jack reached out for the panel. The red light vanished, and the voice spoke at once.
'You have boarded galactic observation station five, sun two thousand and thirty-six, arm two. The station is an automatic outpost of the Hegemony of Malis, a confederation of solar systems occupying most of the centre of this galaxy. The Hegemony knows that you are aware of these facts and of the fact that your system has been under observation since before your recorded history. It warns you, as a courtesy, that any damage to this station will be followed by the prompt destruction of your Sun from one of an unspecified number of other stations.'
'Well, you've already told us that there are at least five,' Langer said grimly. 'However, we intend no damage. We want to communicate directly with the Hegemony.'
'For what purpose?'
'We want to ask permission to visit its territory.'
'Probationers are forbidden to enter any space ruled by the Hegemony. If you survive probation, your system will automatically become a part of that space. There are no exceptions.'
'Do you know how long our probation period is?' Dr Langer demanded.
'Fifty thousand years.'
'Then you are aware that it has been cut in half. Do you know why?'
'The Hegemony chose to honour the recommendation of the Star Dwellers - those proto-beings you call Angels.'
'Hence an exception has already been made,' Dr Langer pointed out. 'Unless you are programmed to actively disregard the possible consequences of an alliance between a probationer race and the Dwellers, your instructions do not cover such a situation and you are incapable of passing judgment on our request without relaying it to the Hegemony.'
'No such instructions exist,' the machine agreed promptly. 'The Hegemony will automatically be made aware of your request, as it is of everything observed by the stations.'
They seemed to Jack to have reached an impasse, but Langer had not quite fired his last round.
'Without instructions,' he said, 'you have no choice but to regard the situation as an unspecified emergency.'
'Very well,' the machine said to Jack's astonishment. There was a sudden, deep hum which Jack felt through the soles of his boots almost as strongly as he heard it from the earphones, and then - a long silence. He held his breath.
Then there was another voice. It was very faint and spoke in a language Jack did not know. Also, it was a good octave deeper than any voice he had ever heard before. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
'Permission is granted,' the machine's voice said matter-of-factly. 'The station is instructed to prepare charts. For this, the specifications of your vessel are necessary.'
'They aren't available at the present time,' Dr Langer said. 'We'll supply them later. Can we call you by radio?'
'Yes. All frequencies are monitored. Simply ask for the station by number.'
'Okay,' Dr Langer said. 'Jack, let's get out of here.'
And once more Jack found himself swung through the colour-splashed caverns of Phobos.
Sandbag Stevens greeted them inside the Ariadne with obvious relief.
'I was beginning to think you were never going to come back out of that hole,' he said. 'I tried listening in on the suit frequency, but of course I didn't pick up a thing.'
'Not with all that steel in the way,' Dr Langer agreed.
'Briefly, the situation is this: we proposed a trip to the Heart Stars and got nowhere until I played our trump card. Then we got permission without an instant's further argument. I don't know what that implies, but from my point of view it's the worst possible sign.'
Sandbag raised his blond eyebrows. 'Why, sir?'
'Because back home they'll take it to mean that the Hegemony of Malis, which is what the confederation calls itself, is afraid of the Angels. It'll make them doubly eager to try to use the Angels to push us into membership, and there must be a thousand ways in which that can turn sour.'
He sat down at the control board, drumming his fingers and staring out at the savage landscape of Phobos. 'We've got to make them understand that the forces arrayed against any such attempt are absolutely overwhelming. Just for a sampler, Jerry, the computer that runs the station down below warned us, in a completely routine way, that if we damaged anything, it would blow up the Sun.'
Sandbag whistled. 'Is that even possible, sir?'
'Suns blow up by themselves with fair regularity. At least we've always assumed that it was a natural occurrence. Now we'll have to assume that at least some novas occur because the Heart Stars do not like the colour of somebody's necktie. That alone tells you how utterly merciless these people must be - if the history of Mars hasn't told us that already.'
'Then we might not make the trip after all?' Jack said. Despite the obvious advantages of having nothing whatsoever to do with the Hegemony of Malis for the next 50,000 years, he felt vaguely disappointed.
'Oh, we're going, all right,' Dr Langer said, motioning the cadets to their takeoff posts. 'It would be just as dangerous not to go, at this point. We've committed ourselves.'

CHAPTER FOUR
The Argo
It was apparent even to the cadets that the Ariadne, fleet and powerful though she uniquely was, would not be a suitable craft for a voyage of such unprecedented length. Dr Langer's personal cruiser was, to be sure, the fastest thing in space - or at least, the fastest ever built by human beings -but she had achieved that status by virtue of the fact that her Nernst generators were as large as any to be found aboard an interstellar liner and consequently took up more than half the space inside her.
They would still need the power and more, but an even more important consideration was stores. Oxygen was no problem. That would be converted from carbon dioxide, water, and artificial light by the ship's photosynthetic generator, a maze of glassware which worked exactly like a growing green plant, but much more efficiently, since it wasn't also asked to support growth, flowering, or any other of the many complex functions of living plants.
But food and water could not be generated, except for the sugars and starches which the photosynthetic process turned out as by-products. The human diet absolutely requires certain minimum amounts of high-quality animal protein whether synthetic or natural; a source of the nearly forty vitamins which serve as catalysts in human metabolism; sufficient trace minerals such as cobalt and manganese to permit the construction of cellular enzymes; large amounts of calcium to maintain bony structures; and similar amounts of phosphorus to make it available and to go into the making of adenosine triphosphate, that marvellous substance through which the cell brings about its energy transfers; and much more. There were no such things as 'food pills', and there were never likely to be any, either.
As for water, the irreducible minimum was a quart per person per day.
'It's the old, familiar, vicious cycle of lengthy space journeys,' Dr Langer was explaining to Secretary Hart shortly after the Ariadne's return to home base. 'The farther you go, the bigger the amount of stores you need; the bigger amount of stores, the bigger the ship; the bigger the ship, the more power you need; the more power you pack in, the smaller the available storage space - either that or you limit the power in favour of stores, which means a slower ship, a longer journey, more stores for the extra months ... Anyhow, Dan, I've run off some curves from the course that the computer in Phobos gave us. We have to go about thirty thousand light years each way and allow time for visits, parleying, and, of course, emergencies. I don't want to consume more than two years all told - preferably much less.'
'Why not, sir?' Sandbag put in. 'Two years out of fifty thousand isn't much. It isn't even a very big bite out of a lifetime.'
'True enough,' Dr Langer said. 'But, Jerry, this is neither our first nor our last job. With all due respect, Dan, I've never seen the year when you didn't call on my services at least three times. If I'm going to be out of earshot for as much as two years, you ought to be thinking about training a successor. Remember, the President insists that both Jerry and Jack go along, which leaves you without both my understudy and your own.'
Jack had not been able to repress a start at the mention of the President. Was he the one behind this highly ill-advised scheme? It seemed wholly unlike him. Secretary Hart, however, was able to read Jack's expression with the ease of long familiarity.
'Howard didn't mean the President of the United States,' he said. 'It's the current president of the Security Council who's been pressing for this policy.'
'M. Savarin?'
'Yes. Of course, he'll only be in office a month, but he's got backing; the notion won't die when he steps down. Howard, I'd be as happy as you to see this junket last a good deal less than two years. What's the minimum ship for that short a time-span? You were about to tell me, I believe.'
'Yes,' the troubleshooter said. 'I make it a vessel about the size of the old Telemachus, fitted out with engines to the Ariadne's design - plus all possible improvements, of course - but sufficiently larger to deliver about twenty per cent more power.'
Both cadets whistled. The Telemachus had been a liner with a capacity of two thousand passengers and crew; Dr Langer was now proposing to build such a ship to carry only three people. Secretary Hart did not whistle, but he got out his slide rule, and after a few quick manipulations managed suddenly to look as sad and worried as a bloodhound.
'About twenty-five million dollars if we can convert the Telemachus, which I doubt,' he said. 'If we have to start from the keel up, it might run forty million. Well, that ought to make M. Savarin think twice.'