"CLARKE, Arthur C. - Odyssey 3 - 2061 Odyssey Three" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clarke Arthur C)

'So we'll go weightless at 12.00 exactly. Before then, your cabin stewards will check that everything's correctly stowed. It will be just like turnaround, except that this time it's going to be three days, not two hours, before we have weight again.

'Halley's gravity? Forget it - less than one centimetre per second squared - just about a thousandth of Earth's. You'll be able to detect it if you wait long enough, but that's all. Takes fifteen seconds for something to fall a metre.

'For safety, I'd like you all here in the observation lounge, with your seat belts properly secured, during rendezvous and touchdown. You'll get the best view from here anyway, and the whole operation won't take more than an hour. We'll only be using very small thrust corrections, but they may come from any angle and could cause minor sensory disturbances.'

What the Captain meant, of course, was spacesickness - but that word, by general agreement, was taboo aboard Universe. It was noticeable, however, that many hands strayed into the compartments beneath the seats, as if checking that the notorious plastic bags would be available if urgently required.

The image on the viewscreen expanded, as the magnification was increased. For a moment it seemed to Floyd that he was in an aeroplane, descending through light clouds, rather than in a spacecraft approaching the most famous of all comets. The nucleus was growing larger and clearer; it was no longer a black dot, but an irregular ellipse - now a small, pockmarked island lost in the cosmic ocean - then, suddenly, a world in its own right.

There was still no sense of scale. Although Floyd knew that the whole panorama spread before him was less than ten kilometres across, he could easily have imagined that he was looking at a body as large as the Moon. But the Moon was not hazy around the edges, nor did it have little jets of vapour - and two large ones - spurting from its surface.

'My God!' cried Mihailovich, 'what's that?'

He pointed to the lower edge of the nucleus, just inside the terminator. Unmistakably - impossibly -a light was flashing there on the nightside of the comet with a perfectly regular rhythm: on, off, on, off, once every two or three seconds.

Dr Willis gave his patient 'I can explain it to you in words of one syllable' cough, but Captain Smith got there first.

'I'm sorry to disappoint you, Mr Mihailovich. That's only the beacon on Sampler Probe Two - it's been sitting there for a month, waiting for us to come and pick it up.'

'What a shame; I thought there might be someone - something - there to welcome us.'

'No such luck, I'm afraid; we're very much on our own out here. That beacon is just where we intend to land - it's near Halley's south pole and is in permanent darkness at the moment. That will make it easier on our life-support systems. The temperature's up to 120 degrees on the Sunlit side - way above boiling point.'

'No wonder the comet's perking,' said the unabashed Dimitri. 'Those jets don't look very healthy to me. Are you sure it's safe to go in?'

'That's another reason we're touching down on the nightside; there's no activity there. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must get back to the bridge. This is the first chance I've ever had of landing on a new world - and I doubt if I'll get another.'

Captain Smith's audience dispersed slowly, and in unusual silence. The image on the viewscreen zoomed back to normal, and the nucleus dwindled once more to a barely visible spot. Yet even in those few minutes it seemed to have grown slightly larger, and perhaps that was no illusion. Less than four hours before encounter, the ship was still hurtling towards the comet at fifty thousand kilometres an hour.

It would make a crater more impressive than any that Halley now boasted, if something happened to the main drive at this stage of the game.



16
Touchdown



The landing was just as anticlimactic as Captain Smith had hoped. It was impossible to tell the moment when Universe made contact; a full minute elapsed before the passengers realized that touchdown was complete, and raised a belated cheer.

The ship lay at one end of a shallow valley, surrounded by hills little more than a hundred metres high. Anyone who had been expecting to see a lunar landscape would have been greatly surprised; these formations bore no resemblance at all to the smooth, gentle slopes of the Moon, sand-blasted by micrometeorite bombardment over billions of years.

There was nothing here more than a thousand years old; the Pyramids were far more ancient than this landscape. Every time around the Sun, Halley was remoulded - and diminished - by the solar fires. Even since the 1986 perihelion passage, the shape of the nucleus had been subtly changed. Melding metaphors shamelessly, Victor Willis had nevertheless put it rather well when he told his viewers: 'The "peanut" has become wasp-waisted!'

Indeed, there were indications that, after a few more revolutions round the Sun, Halley might split into two roughly equal fragments - as had Biela's comet, to the amazement of the astronomers of 1846.

The virtually non-existent gravity also contributed to the strangeness of the landscape. All around were spidery formations like the fantasies of a surrealistic artist, and improbably canted rockpiles that could not have survived more than a few minutes even on the Moon.