"Blish, James - Seeding Program" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

BOOK ONE

SEEDING PROGRAM

The spaceship resumed humming around Sweeney without his
noticing the change. When Capt. Meikiejon's voice finally
came again from the wall speaker, Sweeney was still lying
buckled to his bunk in a curious state of .tranquility he had
never known before, and couldn't possibly have described,
even to himself. Though he had a pulse, he might otherwise
have concluded that he was dead. It took him several minutes
to respond.
"Sweeney, do you hear me? Are you all right?"
The brief hesitation in the pilot's breathing made Sweeney
grin. From Meikiejon's point of view, and that of most of the
rest of humanity, Sweeney was all wrong. He was, in fact,
dead.
The heavily insulated cabin, with its own airlock to the out-
side, and no access for Sweeney at all to the rest of the ship,
was a testimonial to his wrongness. So was Meikiejon's tone:
the voice of a man addressing, not another human being, but
something that had to be kept in a vault.
A vault designed to protect the universe outside it not to
protect its contents from the universe. . '
"Sure, I'm all right," Sweeney said, snapping the buckle and
sitting up. He checked the thermometer, which still registered
its undeviating minus 194 F.the mean surface temperature
of Ganymede, moon number III of Jupiter. "I was- dozing,
sort of. What's up?"
"I'm putting the ship into her orbit; we're about a thousand
miles up from the satellite now. I thought you might want to
take a look."
"Sure enough. Thanks, Mickey."
The wall speaker said, "Yeah. Talk to you later." Sweeney
grappled for the guide rail and pulled himself over to the
cabin's single bull'seye port, maneuvering with considerable
precision. For a man to whom 1/6 Earth gravity is normal, free
fall -a situation of no gravity at all-is only an extreme case.
Which was what Sweeney was, too. A human being -but
an extreme case.
He looked out. He knew exactly what he would sec; he had
studied it exhaustively from photos, from teletapes, from
maps, and through telescopes both at home on the Moon and
on Mars. When you approach Ganymede at inferior conjunc-
tion, as Meikiejon was doing, the first thing that hits you in
the eye is the huge oval blot called Neptune's Trident so
named by the earliest Jovian explorers because it was marked
with the Greek letter psi on the old Howe composite map. The
name had turned out to have been well chosen: that blot is a