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

'I doubt it,' Dr Langer said. 'The need for haste is solely to the benefit of the United States; I don't see why the United Nations would mind if we took longer. If we insist upon a maximum mission time of two years, they'll ask us to put up most of the money, that's all - and I don't myself see how we'd get ourselves out of it. Of course, that's your field of competence, not mine.'
'Have you ever tried to bargain with a Frenchman over money?' the Secretary for Space said gloomily. 'And the UN is chronically short of cash, anyhow. You're right. If we want speed, it'll be up to us to pay for it. Hmm.'
Secretary Hart pulled reflectively at his nose.
'Look, Howard,' he said at last, 'engines that size will fill the cargo-hold of a ship like the Telemachus, as well as the formal engine-rooms.'
'True enough. I figured that we'd use the passenger quarters and wardrooms for storage, and we'd stick strictly to officer's country in the nose blister.'
'Yes, I think that would be practicable, providing, of course, that we don't have to build a whole new ship. But Howard, it seems to me that there's a question of efficiency here. We know from Jack's experience aboard the Ariadne that an Angel can run a Nernst generator of that size at about ninety per cent of its theoretical output. With a larger generator, they can do even better - whereas we've never been able to crank the machine much beyond forty-five per cent. Have you considered taking aboard a fourth crew member? Jack's friend, HESPERUS, perhaps?'
The idea made beautiful sense, Jack thought. Even if the size of the planned engines remained the same, they would put out so much more power that the ship could be made substantially smaller, which would, in turn, increase its speed still more and still further reduce the mass of supplies necessary. But Dr Langer was frowning.
'It would work,' he said. 'And I'd like to have an Angel on the trip for several other reasons, too. For example, they know much more about the territory we'll be entering than we do. And HESPERUS is a rather engaging character; I'm sure Jack would welcome his company as much as I.'
'I'm all for it,' Jack said eagerly. 'There might come a time when we'd need him to pop out to say "Boo!" to somebody, too. He'd make good insurance in tight spots.'
'That's exactly what I don't like about the idea,' Dr Langer said heavily. 'To get HESPERUS's co-operation, we'd need to explain the reason for the trip to him, which would mean that it would immediately become known to all the other Angels, including the ones now on Earth. I'm dead sure they'd object to our using the alliance between our two races for a naked power play of this sort. It's contrary to the whole spirit of the treaty, and Dan, that was precisely the argument you used against it before the Security Council in camera. If we let HESPERUS in on what we're doing, we might well be in the gravest of trouble before we even left home.'
'No doubt about that,' the Secretary said. 'Though that's the way it might well wind up anyhow. All right, Major, we'll do without HESPERUS - though it's going to reduce my budget to flinders. Can we re-commission the Telemachus?'
'I think we can. The McCrary Yards have made me some blueprints, and they look reasonable. Besides, they built the liner originally.'
'Good,' Hart said. 'Let's just be sure we do the cost accounting, not McCrary; he's a slippery customer. What are you going to call this monster, may I ask?'
'For a voyage like this, there's only one possible name,' Dr Langer said. 'It's going to be an argosy. Let's call the ship the Argo.'
'Appropriate,' Secretary Hart agreed. Though if you come back with anything remotely like the Golden Fleece, I'll be very much surprised.'
'So,' Dr Langer said, 'will I.'
Because both Jack and Sandbag were good friends of Sylvia McCrary, the young reporter for Trans-Solar Press who was also Paul X. McCrary's daughter, they were to some extent able to follow the conversion of the Telemachus into the Argo in the McCrary Yards, as well as through the reports that flowed daily into Secretary Hart's Washington office. The immense hulk - only a year ago the pride of the run to the colonial planets of the star 40 Eridani, but now obsolete - was being rebuilt in graving docks just outside Dover, New Jersey, in what had been the US Army's Picatinny Arsenal until the world rule of the United Nations had abolished solely national armed forces. The vast holding corporation of which McCrary Engineering was only one of four wholly owned subsidiaries had been more than eager to buy Pica-tinny from the government, and it got a bargain. As for the government, it was delighted to get rid of the graving docks and every other possible collection of the space-travel hardware it had been carrying at enormous losses for decades. It would, of course, continue to regulate the spaceways, but it was delighted to let people like Paul X. McCrary try to make a profit out of them, something the government itself was forbidden to do.
Picatinny was an easy trip from Washington, and the cadets were able to make frequent visits, though all on their own time, to watch the liner being turned from a gleaming, slightly over-stuffed flying palace into something almost as grimly functional as a twentieth century battleship. All the vessel's luxury appointments were scrapped, cabin partitions ripped out, lighting systems thinned, plumbing and ventilation abolished completely except in the control blister, the immense galley replaced by a kitchenette no bigger than a closet. In what had once been the main salon, murmuring with music and voices and lit in part by the icy points of stars shining through the astrodome, there was now only rank after rank of crates, their shoulders hunched against the sky. Here Sandbag paused to look about them with some disapproval.
'If it'd been up to me,' he said, 'this is where I'd have put the gunnery deck. Look at all this outside visibility going to waste!'
'I have an idea that any guns we could carry wouldn't be of much use where we're going,' Jack said. 'We might just as well carry fly-swatters.'
'You're a cheerful cuss!'
'I'm just going by what your boss tells me,' Jack protested. 'Anyhow, this is supposed to be a diplomatic mission. It seems to me that the last thing we want to do is pick a fight.'
'I know, I know. Let's go on up into the blister. The echoes in this place are awful since they ripped out the carpet.'
That, as it turned out, was their last inspection. As soon as the Telemachus had been stripped down as far as possible -the crates in the main salon had turned out to contain contractor's supplies rather than anything that was destined to go aboard the ship - tugs took it off the ground and put it into an orbit around the Earth about five hundred miles up. All the really heavy machinery, as well as the supplies, would be installed up there piecemeal. This was partly for reasons of economy, but only partly: the truth was that Haertel overdrive engines of the size necessary to propel the fully loaded Argo could not be operated safely any closer to a large planetary mass.
And it was the Haertel faster-than-light drive, of course, which made interstellar travel possible at all. Until quite late in the preceding century, almost everyone believed flight between the stars (not the planets - that was already a going concern) to be for ever out of the question because of the vast distances involved. Distance can always be conquered by speed, but the prevailing relativity theory of that day had laid it down as natural law that nothing material could ever go as fast as light, which itself took many years to go from one star to another.
There had been another relativity theory under study, by a British astronomer named Milne, which taught that the speed-of-light limitation was only a mathematical convenience, not a natural law. But nobody could think of a way to test this notion, and besides, the accepted Einsteinian relativity was working so well that nobody really bothered to try. Then, in the mid-1960s, another Briton, a man named Dingle, found two subtle but enormous errors in Einstein's reasoning, thus shaking up the study of theoretical physics as thoroughly as Einstein himself once had.
Many great minds sought to close up those two holes, but it was not until 2011 that the great Haertel succeeded by showing that the Einstein theory of relativity was only a 'special case' of Milne's relativity, and Milne's, in turn, only a special case of Haertel's. It was Dr Langer's sober opinion that Haertel had been the greatest theoretical physicist the world had ever known, and Jack, who utterly lacked the knowledge of highest mathematics necessary to come to his own decision, was happy to take Langer's word for it.
The faster-than-light drive was the practical outcome, one of many, of Haertel's pencil-and-paper achievement, brought into reality only nineteen years after Haertel's epoch-making paper had been published. Interstellar travel by the men of Earth had begun.
It was high time. Though only the highest councils of government knew about it, two of the robot outposts of the Heart Stars had already been discovered: Phobos first, obviously established to watch the extinct Martians; and then the brick-shaped, one-mile-long asteroid, Eros, whose occasional close approaches to the Earth made it an ideal instrument for the observation of mankind. The Heart Stars had in fact inadvertently done the Earth a favour, for the discovery that somebody else already had interstellar flight forced into the discard any theory that said such a thing was for ever impossible. In scientific research, Dr Langer often said, finding out that something can be done is half the battle; finding out just how to do it then becomes relatively easy.
What remained to be discovered about the attempt to penetrate the Heart Stars, however, was an even more fundamental question: whether or not it was worth doing at all And as usual, there was no way to know the answer to that in advance.

CHAPTER FIVE
The Long Fall
The removal of the proto-Argo to orbit naturally put an end to the side trips. Jack and Sandbag at once found themselves up to their eyebrows in technical briefings, mostly about the vast ship's construction and operation. The scene of the briefings, however, was shifted from the offices of the Department of Space in Washington to the United Nations Building in New York, because the briefing also included a cram course in all that was known about the Hegemony of Malis, and on possible responses to every imaginable move the Hegemony might make during the trip.
Emerging late one summer afternoon from a particularly maddening session - all of the material about the Heart Stars was imparted in a locked room under the most involved 'security' precautions - they ran into Sylvia. This was no special surprise in itself, for despite the fact that she, too, was just eighteen, she was a full-fledged reporter for Trans-Solar Press, and the UN was her current beat. She was waiting for them by the Pool of the Dolphins, notebook in hand.
'Can't say a word,' Sandbag offered with a grin the instant that they were in earshot. 'Top secret. Fate of the universe and all that.'
'You've already said too much,' Sylvia said, only half jokingly. 'Things do leak now and then, Sandbag. And I've heard just enough about this mission to know that you may not be far wrong - even if you were kidding.'
Sandbag's expression went blank, but Sylvia only laughed. 'Don't worry,' she said. 'This one's not for me, and I know it. Last time I thought I was within my rights to dig out as much as I could manage. After all, my own father was mixed up in it pretty thoroughly. But this mission's out of my province entirely. My lips are sealed, as they say on the three-V.'
'How about mine?' a high, almost quacking voice said. It seemed to come from almost directly below where Sylvia was sitting on the edge of the pool.
Startled, Jack looked down, though he knew at once what he would see. Even after nearly a century of communication between man and dolphin, it was easy for most people to forget that the creatures were as intelligent as man himself, though in vastly different ways. After all, the average man had so few contacts with them, and the dolphins in the pool, as playful as almost all of their species, enjoyed startling the unwary or the forgetful.
Sylvia, however, only laughed again. 'Why, Tursiops,' she said. 'Don't you know it's impolite to eavesdrop?'
'Not among us,' the dolphin said. Jack could not tell whether the eight-foot black torpedo was a personal friend of Sylvia's, though, of course, she must have had many opportunities to make friends with the denizens of the pool. The name she had used was only the generic name of the bottle-nosed or shoals dolphin and one which these gregarious creatures had adopted as a tribal name. 'Besides, it was only a little one - an eavesdrip.'
'Those puns,' Sylvia said with mock severity, 'have got to. go. All the same, if you didn't hear much, you can't babble much. That's a relief.'
For answer, Tursiops rolled swiftly over on one side and splashed Sylvia with a single scud of a fluke. Then he went bounding away in a series of out-of-the-water leaps, emitting from his blowhole a remarkable imitation of Sylvia's own laughter.
'Do you know him well?' Jack said. 'Or is it a her?'
'I can't tell, but yes, I know them all. They're very kind and gentle, a lot nicer than most of the people I know, and a lot brighter, too. I hate to see them cooped up in this pool.'
'Why?' Sandbag said. 'They only stay until winter and then go free. In the meantime, they're protected and fed...'
'Protected!' Sylvia said. 'Did you ever get a good look at the teeth in those ever-smiling jaws? All one hundred of them and all sharp as needles? They don't need to be afraid of anything that lives in the sea, not with those teeth - and those brains. I just wish they had the sense to be afraid of us, or at least a little impatient.'
'We don't hurt them any more,' Jack said slowly. 'We stopped hunting them the minute Doctor Lilly and the others proved they were intelligent. And didn't they agree that ten of them should live in the pool each year, to represent their race and all the other whales? We didn't force them into it, as I remember.'
'True.' The voice of the dolphin came this time from beneath Jack's perch. Their silence and swiftness were astounding.