"Cassutt, Michael - More Adventures On Other Planets" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cassutt Michael)

"I'm listening."

Haas and Rebecca explain the difficulties. "Rebecca," he says, meaning Element Rebecca, "can't get to the site."

Earl feels sick to his stomach. "Something wrong with the map?" The map derived from Element Earl data.

"The map's perfect," Rebecca says. "But Tufts Passage seems to have gotten tighter." She is referring to a tunnel in an ice hill just large enough for Element Earl (which is, in fact, about the size of a supermarket shopping cart) to pass through. "I'm stuck. Can't go forward, can't back up."

"That's pretty goddamn strange," Earl says.

"It might have been something as simple as the heat of Earl's passage melting the ice," Haas says, trying to be helpful.

"The power module's right on my butt, too," Rebecca says, "and Asif's even fatter than I am." She means Element Asif, named for its operator, a Bangladeshi Earl doesn't know well.

"So you need me to map a new route." What Earl wants to do is walk out of J2E2 mission control and never look back. To go to his forty-five-footer and take a sail, and maybe never come back. But what he says is, "Let's do it."

"You're outside your margin," Haas says. "I can't ask you to do the job."

"I'll get the doctors to sign a waiver."

"They won't. You know that."

"It's so risky," Rebecca says. "What if he has a failure while you're linked." This was a genuine problem: ten years ago, during an earlier AGC SLIPPER operation on Mars, an operator happened to be linked real-time when his rover suffered a catastrophic failure. The operator suffered a stroke and was never the same again. Hence the limits and mission rules.

"Earl won't let me down," Earl says.

"He's got all the power he needs," Haas says, agreeing, "but he's had the Big Chill. He'll be going back into the cold without a bake. The accident rate is substantially higherЧ"

"I know that, you know that, we all know that," Earl snaps. "We also know that you wouldn't have asked me if you didn't need me. So let's go."

Rebecca requires further convincing. "What about the doctors?"

"Don't tell them I'm getting back in the suit."

Angry at their clumsiness, he chases them out of the dressing room. As he begins to don the suit, however, his mood changes. What if something did happen to Element Earl? The human operator knows that a mission is finite, that his linkage won't go on forever. But the elements on Europa are powered by radio-thermal generators that can give life for hundreds of years. Unless an element is totally destroyed, it lives on, diminished, possibly blind, but capable of responding to stimuli or processing data.

He zips up the suit, feeling a surprising pang of sadness. For Element Earl, or himself?




╖ ╖ ╖ ╖ ╖

It is always a mixture of pleasure and terror, being linked via SLIPPER to an element on Europa. One of Earl's first instructors, knowing Earl's fondness for sailing and things nautical, compared it to Acapulco cliff diving. After a dozen sessions in the SLIPPER suit, Earl decided that his instructor was an idiot. Linking with an element was only like diving off a cliff if the moment of fear and exhilaration were stretched to an hour. Yes, there is the wonder of feeling that you are crunching Europan snow beneath your "feet," navigating your way through the jumbled heaps of ice like a child picking his way through a forest.

But you must also endure the sheer discomfort of the SLIPPER suit: the data leads that bite and scratch; the sweat that oozes from your neck, armpits, and crotch (occasionally shorting out a lead), then cools to a clammy pool in the small of your back; the stomach-turning smell of burnt flesh (which no one can seem to explain); the data overlays that mar your pristine vision; the goddamn chatter from Haas and his team, who treat all operators like children with "special needs"Чall while feeling that you are being flung across the universe on the nose of a starship driven at nearЦlight speed by a drunk.

Somehow, Earl forces himself to accept the usual stresses while ignoring the protests from the medical support team as he drives Element Earl back out on the trail. (The doctors have been conditioned to look for conditions that could be linked directly to SLIPPER side effects. Other than that, they give the operators great license, especially since each operator has already released AGC from liability now and forever.) For amusement, he watches the thermal readout of his element's temperature. It dropped sharply as he exited the Hoppa shelter, and now it climbs slowly as friction and the general expenditure of heat are displayed. It reminds Earl of waiting for a download on his first computer forty years back.

Except for the thin wall between booths, Earl and Rebecca could reach out and touch fingertips. Yet each exchange of data must go from Earl to Hoppa Station to Element Earl to Element Rebecca back to Hoppa and La Jolla, a round trip of 964,000,000 miles in a fraction of a second, thanks to the SLIPPER technology, which pumps data at 300 times the speed of light. For years Earl grew excited every time he thought about the process; now, of course, he finds even the tiniest glitch or lag to be an annoyance.