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

Dr Heywood Floyd stared thoughtfully at the ever-changing panorama of the beautiful planet, only six thousand kilometres away, on which he could never walk again. It was even more ironic that, through the most stupid accident of his life, he was still in excellent health when virtually all his old friends were dead.

He had been back on Earth only a week when, despite all the warnings and his own determination that nothing of the sort would ever happen to him, he had stepped off that second-storey balcony. (Yes, he had been celebrating: but he had earned it - he was a hero on the new world to which Leonov had returned.) The multiple fractures had led to complications, which could best be handled in the Pasteur Space Hospital.

That had been in 2015. And now - he could not really believe it, but there was the calendar on the wall - it was 2061.

For Heywood Floyd, the biological clock had not merely been slowed down by the one-sixth Earth gravity of the hospital; twice in his life it had actually been reversed. It was now generally believed - though some authorities disputed it - that hibernation did more than merely stop the ageing process; it encouraged rejuvenation. Floyd had actually become younger on his voyage to Jupiter and back.

'So you really think it's safe for me to go?'

'Nothing in this Universe is safe, Heywood. All I can say is that there are no physiological objections. After all, your environment will be virtually the same aboard Universe as it is here. She may not have quite the standard of - ah - superlative medical expertise we can provide at Pasteur, but Dr Mahindran is a good man. If there's any problem he can't cope with, he can put you into hibernation again, and ship you back to us, COD.'

It was the verdict that Floyd had hoped for, yet somehow his pleasure was alloyed with sadness. He would be away for weeks from his home of almost half a century, and the new friends of his later years. And although Universe was a luxury liner compared with the primitive Leonov (now hovering high above Farside as one of the main exhibits at the Lagrange Museum) there was still some element of risk in any extended space voyage. Especially like the pioneering one on which he was now preparing to embark.



Yet that, perhaps, was exactly what he was seeking - even at a hundred and three (or, according to the complex geriatric accounting of the late Professor Katerina Rudenko, a hale and hearty sixty-five.) During the last decade, he had become aware of an increasing restlessness and a vague dissatisfaction with a life that was too comfortable and well-ordered.

Despite all the exciting projects now in progress around the Solar System - the Mars Renewal, the establishment of the Mercury Base, the Greening of Ganymede - there had been no goal on which he could really focus his interests and his still considerable energies. Two centuries ago, one of the first poets of the Scientific Era had summed up his feelings perfectly, speaking through the lips of Odysseus/Ulysses:



Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one of me

Little remains; but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things: and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this grey spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.



'Three suns', indeed! It was more than forty:

Ulysses would have been ashamed of him. But the next verse - which he knew so well - was even more appropriate:



It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: