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

'Then you don't mind it - not being free?' Sylvia said.
There was the briefest of pauses. Then Tursiops said, 'I am always free. But I can remember... greater happiness.'
For no reason that he could assign, this conversation haunted Jack for all the rest of the week. The next Monday, however, it was driven entirely out of his head - and small wonder.
The Argo,' Secretary Hart announced, 'is ready to go.'
The very hugeness of the Argo - a ship now manned by three people but built originally for two thousand - made her a creature of silences. Her engines, despite their power, were nearly silent to begin with, and they were so far away from where Jack and Sandbag and Dr Langer lived and worked that not even a whisper of their song came through. The controls, of course, made no noise at all. As for the storage areas, Jack quickly developed a strong distaste for them, for they were so cavernous that every move one made in them produced a slight echo which was much more disquieting than dead silence would have been.
It was very much like being cast away in a deserted ocean liner, and after the first week both cadets stuck as close as possible to the control bubble - itself containing about twice as much space as the whole of the Ariadne - and pretended determinedly that the rest of the Argo didn't exist. The pretence was not very workable, however. For one thing, Dr Langer frequently went on expeditions into the bowels of the vessel to tend this or that piece of personal apparatus. He had brought along, for example, eight complex cameras and enough darkroom stores and equipment to serve a university library, and he had also a studio-full of high-speed sound-recording equipment to which he devoted much care. Quite frequently, he required a cadet with him on these expeditions.
Then there was the matter of the galley. It would have suited Jack perfectly if Dr Langer had done all the cooking, for he was an expert chef and could produce marvels even with ship's rations. Almost everything that Sandbag made, even omelettes, came out with the consistency and flavour of baked rubber, and Jack did not think his own cooking was much better. Dr Langer, however, would officiate for one week out of each three, and insisted that the cadets chop-and-change with him, despite the fact that he obviously found the messes they made nearly as inedible as they did.
'This is going to be a long voyage,' he said. 'An ideal opportunity for both of you to learn to cook - a high art and a time-consuming one.'
'Sir, isn't the definition of an art that it's a form of communication?' Jack asked. 'If that's the case, I don't see how cooking qualifies.'
'I don't know anybody who can tell you precisely what music or architecture communicate,' Dr Langer said. 'But it's agreed that they are arts. I think a great deal depends upon the attitude of the practitioner. The average hamburger-burner can't be called an artist; but the author of Larousse Gastronomique, well ... if that book isn't about an art, then neither is Lessing's Laocoon.'
'Uh, I never heard of that,' Sandbag said. 'What's it about?'
'Sculpture, to start with. It's a study of the whole subject of aesthetics, not an art work in itself, but a discussion of art works. Which is precisely what a great cookbook is.'
Privately, Jack still suspected that Dr Langer was riding a hobby, but he was the captain, so both cadets had to serve their weeks in the galley and in prowling through the echoing storage bins looking for the makings of menus.
In the meantime, the Argo hurtled inward towards the constellation of Sagittarius, the Archer, where the Heart Stars lay, heavily obscured by great dark areas and lanes of dust like the Coal Sacks in Cygnus where men and Angels had first met. As the Argo flew, aimed at the east-pointing part of the constellation which is often called the Milk Dipper, the stars of Sagittarius crawled away from each other, so slowly at first that only the spectroscope could show it, but the time would come when that movement would be visible to the naked eye. The Argo was already consuming nearly a light year an hour and even so was nowhere near up to cruising speed.
She had already passed that rather ill-defined boundary line - a pure fiction in space where everything is in motion all the time - which marked the outermost limits of human exploration in this direction, but she still had a long way to go before reaching the marches of the Hegemony of Malis. The Heart Stars had, of course, explored this far out, and farther - for had they not penetrated the system of Sol itself? - but they had not settled it and did not consider it an integral part of their realm.
'That doesn't mean we wouldn't get shot at fast enough if we deviated from the course they've laid out,' Dr Langer said. 'This region of the galaxy isn't a part of the Hegemony, but they aren't going to let any upstart make free with it, either.'
'Sort of like a protectorate?' Jack asked.
'Yes, or like mandated territory.'
'Are we really being watched that continuously?' Sandbag said. 'I thought a ship on the Standing Wave wasn't detectable.'
'We used to think that. No more.'
'You remember the Angels had no trouble following the Ariadne back to Earth,' Jack reminded the other cadet.
'Well, I do and I don't. I know that it happened, now that you remind me, but I was kind of out of my mind during the actual flight, so I don't remember it happening. Sir, is this just deduction? The Heart Stars may not have all the abilities the Angels have; in fact, this whole trip is based on the hope that they don't!'
'True enough,' Dr Langer agreed. 'But so far I've accumulated three pips on the scanner, which ought to be dead while we're on the Standing Wave. All three are the same shape and one I've never seen before. So I assume that it's a ranging impulse of some kind - may be something we'll eventually call Haertel radar.'
'Hmm,' Jack said. 'If they can make the Standing Wave do anything but stand, they are too tough for us.'
'That's more than possible,' Dr Langer said, but he did not seem much ruffled by the idea, at least, not yet.
By the end of the first month, one more of the strange pips traced itself out on the scanner. Watching the tiny thermo pen form it on the scanner's heat-sensitive paper, the cadets could no longer doubt that the Heart Stars had some way of slamming an impulse into the supposedly closed, independent universe of a ship on Haertel overdrive, and, presumably, getting it back out again, bearing precise information.
Now, however, they were approaching the first official touching point, where the prescribed course required that the Argo come off the Standing Wave and make a first direct contact with an outpost world of the Hegemony. Oddly, when the huge ship dropped back into normal space, where her 'real' speed was only a little more than half that of light, Dr Langer could find no solar system at all within any reasonable distance. The Doppler camera said that the nearest star, the cool red giant, Antares, was nearly three light years away, and furthermore it was in the wrong direction, back along the way they had come.
'If Antares has any planets left, it'll be a nasty shock to the cosmologists back home,' Dr Langer said slowly. 'I'm more inclined to think that my astrogation was out a percentage point somewhere.'
'There's something funny about these plates,' Sandbag complained. 'A lot of the spectral lines are doubled in the blue region. It's Antares' spectrum, all right, but something's skewed a part of it.'
Dr Langer's head came up sharply. If he had been a puppy, Jack thought, he would have cocked his ears and yelped. 'What? Let me see!'
Sandbag passed him the spectra; Dr Langer bent over them, a jeweller's loupe screwed into one eye. Then he began to feed the computer.
'What is it, sir?' Jack asked when the computer had responded with a long strip of tape.
'Companion star,' Dr Langer said with obvious relief. 'A seventh magnitude job that goes in a very wide orbit around Antares. I'd quite forgotten about it. It's a beautiful emerald green, and right at this moment it's on a straight line between us and Antares itself. That accounts for the mixed spectra. That must be our stop. Anyhow, let's give them a call and see.'
The recognition signal went out, by phase-velocity transmission, a method of getting around Einstein which the discovery of the laser had made possible. It involved using a principle familiar to everyone who, watching a caterpillar, has noticed that the waves that go along the caterpillar's body go faster than the caterpillar himself does. Inside a wave-guide or in a tight laser beam, radiation could be made to behave in the same way: the resulting message travelled about 25 per cent faster than light, though the light itself plodded along at 186,000 miles per second, just as always.
The answer came back almost at once - within two days, which was shockingly fast over interstellar distances. Evidently it was being relayed to a nearby robot station from the vicinity of the green sun by some unknown means, and the station then translated it into a phase-velocity message and bounced it on to the Argo.
There was no vision transmission. Only a harsh, gargly voice in heavily accented English: 'Yu-o met-sage retseeved, Ar-go. Yu-ah sed-u-ahl its con-feermed. Pro-tseed ahs de-reck-tsed. Celery pie.'
'Celery pie, my foot,' Dr Langer said under his breath. 'Jerry, they've been studying your cooking! Hello, the Hegemony base? Do you have new co-ordinates for us? We don't seem to be anywhere near your system.'
'Yu-o ah ahn dze bound-ah-dzer-eetz ahv owoo my-ahn-feeyelt,' the gargly voice said. 'Close-ah ap-proatschtz its for-beedy-en. Tzis its a meeleo-tzaireo air-eeoo. Pro-tseed.'
'As directed.' Dr Langer replied. 'But we are getting rather low on water.'
'Dzat wazt ahn-teezupatted. Yu-o veal pie cheeven wah-tzer aht ohe nachst kon-stagt pooncht. End tzans-muttzon.'
There was a loud snap and the carrier wave went dead.
'Celery pie to you, too!' Dr Langer said. 'And also - owoo and och! But I guess the instructions are clear enough, despite that molasses-coated bogus Armenian accent. We go on and we get water at the next stop.'
'Goody,' Sandbag grinned. 'And in the meantime, I'll make a veal-and-cheese pie with trans-Galactic mutton -and close apporkchops on the side.'
'If you do,' Jack shot back, 'I'll serve up nothing but boiled laundry when it's my turn again.'
'No joke,' Dr Langer said. 'Take your posts. The course plan leaves us only an hour to get back into overdrive. Unless I misunderstood the instructions completely, we're actually to touch down on the next planet. And I certainly hope so. I don't see how we'll refill our water tanks otherwise.'
'What do you make of that outfit, sir?' Jack said. They're not much interested in us, it seems to me.'
'No, not at all. I have an idea or two, but I'd rather sit on them for the time being. Let's get cracking. If we don't hit the next touch-down precisely, we'll have dry throats for a long time thereafter. Posts!'
Dry throats, however, did not turn out to be the problem. There was indeed water where they were going - plenty of water.
In fact, over the whole surface of the planet, they could see nothing else.
Even a close approach, in orbit about the planet, did not modify this impression more than slightly. The world was Earth-like in size, atmosphere, and distance from its sun, which, in turn, was very like Sol, but it had no continents at all, nor did it have polar ice caps. The universal ocean which covered it was so heat-conservative that its climate was uniformly subtropical. Even the closest observation - not an easy matter, since about 80 per cent of the surface was always obscured by masses of clouds - disclosed no breaks in the rolling sea except for a number of what looked to be coral atolls. They were big ones by earthly standards, but not even the biggest could properly be dignified with the name of island. And anyhow, they were deserted and bare.