"Clarke, Arthur C - Odissey Two" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clarke Arthur C)

Sleeping in zero gravity is a skill that has to be learned; it had taken Floyd almost a week to find the best way of anchoring legs and arms so that they did not drift into uncomfortable positions. Now he was an expert, and was not looking forward to the return of weight; indeed, the very idea gave him occasional nightmares.

Someone was shaking him awake. No - he must still be dreaming! Privacy was sacred aboard a spaceship; nobody ever entered another crew member's chambers without first asking permission. He clenched his eyes shut, but the shaking continued.

'Dr Floyd - please wake up! You're wanted on the flight deck!'

And nobody called him Dr Floyd; the most formal salutation he had received for weeks was Doc. What was happening?

Reluctantly, he opened his eyes. He was in his tiny cabin, gently gripped by his sleeping cocoon. So one part of his mind told him; then why was he looking at - Europa? They were still millions of kilometres away.

There were the familiar reticulations, the patterns of triangles and polygons formed by intersecting lines. And surely that was the Grand Canal itself - no, it wasn't quite right. How could it be, since he was still in his little cabin aboard Leonov?

'Dr Floyd!'

He became fully awake, and realized that his left hand was floating just a few centimetres in front of his eyes. How strange that the pattern of lines across the palm was so uncannily like the map of Europa! But economical Mother Nature was always repeating herself, on such vastly different scales as the swirl of milk stirred into coffee, the cloud lanes of a cyclonic storm, the arms of a spiral nebula.

'Sorry, Max,' he said. 'What's the problem? Is something wrong?'

'We think so - but not with us. Tsien's in trouble.'

Captain, navigator, and chief engineer were strapped in their seats on the flight deck; the rest of the crew orbited anxiously around convenient handholds, or watched on the monitors.

'Sorry to wake you up, Heywood,' Tanya apologized brusquely. 'Here's the situation. Ten minutes ago we had a Class One Priority from Mission Control. Tsien's gone off the air. It happened very suddenly, in the middle of a cipher message; there were a few seconds of garbled transmission - then nothing.'

'Their beacon?'

'That's stopped as well. We can't receive it either,'

'Phew! Then it must be serious - a major breakdown. Any theories?'

'Lots - but all guesswork. An explosion - landslide - earthquake: who knows?'

'And we may never know - until someone else lands on Europa - or we do a close flyby and take a look.'

Tanya shook her head. 'We don't have enough delta-vee. The closest we could get is fifty thousand kilometres. Not much you could see from that distance.'

'Then there's absolutely nothing we can do.'

'Not quite, Heywood. Mission Control has a suggestion. They'd like us to swing our big dish around, just in case we can pick up any weak emergency transmissions. It's - how do you say? - a long shot, but worth trying. What do you think?'

Floyd's first reaction was strongly negative.

'That will mean breaking our link with Earth.'

'Of course; but we'll have to do that anyway, when we go around Jupiter. And it will only take a couple of minutes to re-establish the circuit.'

Floyd remained silent. The suggestion was perfectly reasonable, yet it worried him obscurely. After puzzling for several seconds, he suddenly realized why he was so opposed to the idea.