"Forward, Robert L - Rocheworld 01 - Rocheworld (The Flight of the Dragonfly) 5.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Forward Robert L)

She signed off, and turned to Petrov. He was holding a small sheet of paper.
"Permit me to be of service," Petrov said. "Here is your message. Congratulations! I only wish I were going in your place."
Jinjur frowned as she took the piece of paper. A concerned look grew on her face as she realized that the Russians had intercepted her message and broken the code in the time it took for her to get out of her suit. She began to wonder if she would be allowed to get back to report the fact.
"Relax," said Petrov with a smile. "From the latest intelligence briefing I received about you when I learned you were on the Interceptor, I was pretty sure what was in the message, so I asked one of our people to feed it to our computer. With the hints I gave it on content, it only took five minutes of computer time to unscramble it. Too bad you change your codes randomly for every message, it might have proved useful."
Relieved that there was no permanent breech in communications security, Jinjur allowed herself to read the message.
"I'm Commander of the Barnard expedition!!" she cried.
"As I said: Congratulations!" said Petrov. "Could you use a good deck-hand?"
"I'm already stuck with somebody for my second-in-command, a Lieutenant Colonel George G. Gudunov. Sounds Russian. Do you know him?"
"Lieutenant Colonel Gudunov is the one who pioneered the idea of laser-driven sailcraft for interstellar travel," said Petrov.
"I was in high school when the first interstellar probes went out," said Jinjur. "I remember thinking how I wished that I were riding on them. Now it looks as though I'm going to get my wish." She paused and shook her head in puzzlement. "But, this _can't_ be the same Gudunov, if he were still in the service he would be a general by now. I guess this George is his son, or one of his relatives. The last thing I need on this trip is a political appointee."
"I have been thoroughly briefed," said Petrov, his massive iron-grey brows furling. "Your George Gudunov is not a general, and will probably never see his star. He _is_ the one that sent out the probes twenty-five years ago."
"But that would mean that he was in his early twenties at the time, and at most a captain," said Jinjur. "He wouldn't have been able to order such a major undertaking. There must be some mistake."
"I'm sure of my sources," said Petrov.
"Well, that can wait until I get back to my ship," said Jinjur. "Meanwhile, we have a more serious problem. The lieutenant in charge of the inspection party reported to me that you have a secret compartment in your cabin."
"Secret compartment?" exclaimed Petrov. He was indignant, yet worried.
"Yes," said Jinjur, moving over to a wall filled with equipment. "This section here," she said, "is hollow."
"Hokay! You win," he said. "But not even the KGB knows about that one." He moved over next to her, then pushed quickly on the side next to the bulkhead. The panel swung open to show a small refrigerator and an eight-inch Questar telescope. He opened the cooler to display a rack of bottles.
"My private vices," he admitted. "California champagne and an American telescope." He pushed back to the cabin door, locked it, barked a few commands in Russian to his crew over the intercom and closed it down.
"I have turned over the ship to my second-in-command," he said. "But first I had them rotate the ship to give us a different view." He took out the telescope and mounted it on the frame of the port. They watched as the stars twirled slowly by the window, then stopped as the ship came to rest again. He lined up the telescope, then pushed back.
"Have a look," he said. Jinjur put her eye to the eyepiece and looked for a long time.
"It's just a small red star," she said. "Nothing unusual about that."
"Except for its speed and its name," he said. "That is Barnard, the fastest moving star in the heavens."
She heard a pop, then turned around. Petrov was an expert at drinking champagne in free-fall. Keeping the cork almost in the neck, he let the bubbling liquid ooze out a little at a time to form small grape-sized balls in the air. The trick was to catch them in your mouth before they settled to the carpet in the low acceleration of the light-tug. Jinjur had to dive within centimeters of the floor to get one of them.
Barnard set behind the limb of the Earth, followed by the Sun. Night fell. The champagne flowed till dawn -- forty-five minutes later.
* * * *
A large, slightly overweight, middle-aged man in a well-worn Air Force officer's uniform walked slowly into the cavernous Pentagon anteroom of the Air Force Chief of Staff. His round, smiling, ruddy-complexioned face was topped by a thick mane of white hair. George wasn't surprised that he'd been summoned, for the pressure had been building up for the past three years since the data started coming in from the Barnard system. His only concern now was his age. At forty-nine he was getting awfully old. It had been decades since he had been in the Pentagon. Being stuck as a flight instructor in the hottest corner of Texas for the past twenty-five years sort of kept you out of things.
George checked in with the secretary in the front office. A civilian, she was gowned like a dress-maker's mannikin and made up as carefully as a Vogue model. He wondered if the Chief of Staff had chosen her for looks or intelligence. He knew the answer as soon as she glanced up and batted her lashes at him.
"You must be Col-o-nel Gud-o-nov!" she exclaimed, her bright eyes glowing behind the fluttering fan of her eyelids. "Weren't you on the Jimmy Collins show? Such excitement! A whole new universe to explore, and you were the one that shot us there with lasers!"
George started to explain that Barnard wasn't a new universe, just another star system. But another look at her depthless eyes, with the shining excitement tingling on their surface, made him hesitate. She, in her own feather-brained way, had learned as much as she was ever going to learn about the Barnard planetary system. Any attempt now to explain the difference between a universe and a planetary system would only destroy whatever appreciation she had of the topic.
"Yes," he admitted, "Jimmy is certainly an interesting person."
"Oh!" she exclaimed, "General Winthrop said to send you right in as soon as you came." She glanced up and down his uniform. Her eyes hesitated at his shoes. He took the implied hint and looked down to find, sticking in the narrow seam between the stiff leather soles and the mirror-buffed top of his regulation Air Force shoes, a tiny ball of fluff picked up in his traverse across the deep acres of Air Force blue pile. He grinned thankfully at her, brushed the offending blue clump away on the back of his trouser leg, and headed for the ornately carved door as she pushed an intercom button and announced his arrival.
George walked smartly into the room. He skirted the huge oak conference table, carefully avoided the seal of the Air Force Chief of Staff woven into the blue rug, and headed for the large desk flanked by two flags. One flag had a field of blue carrying the Air Force Emblem. The other was the Stars and Stripes of the Greater United States with its fifty-nine stars in four rows of eight alternating with three rows of nine. Next year there would be sixty stars as the Northwest Territories finally became populous enough to become a state. That only left the Yukon to go (and of course, Quebec, if they ever came to their senses). He came to attention in front of the desk and saluted, his eyes straight ahead.
General Winthrop glanced up from the papers in front of him, the glitter of four silver stars broadening his shoulders. There was a momentary flicker of raw hatred in his eyes, which faded into a formal politeness.
"Good afternoon, George," he said. "Sit down."
Colonel Gudunov perched on a nearby straight chair and listened.
"Saw you and Senator Maxwell on the Jimmy Collins show last night," Winthrop started. "Quite some company you keep there."
"They wanted someone that could explain what there was in the Barnard system that justified the interstellar expedition, and Senator Maxwell suggested me."
"I've got to admit you did an excellent job of explaining the laser drive in terms even my secretary could understand. She talked about nothing else for the entire coffee break this morning." He shuffled some papers, then drew one out.
"Your friends in Congress have been good to you again, Gudunov." His tone chilled a little. "By all rights, no forty-nine-year-old should be allowed on the Barnard expedition, especially since you're not a regular, but ROT-C." Winthrop didn't even have the courtesy to spell out the initials of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, but gave it the slang pronunciation he had learned at the Academy.
"He must've been pushing one of his people for the position," thought George.
Winthrop straightened and became more formal. "Lieutenant Colonel Gudunov: You have been selected to participate in the Barnard expedition to take place in two years. You are hereby promoted to Colonel and will be second-in-command, reporting to Major General Virginia Jones, Space Marine Corps."
George winced and grinned internally at the same time. He had never met "Jinjur", but had heard a great deal about her. He had wistfully hoped that he would be chosen to lead the expedition, but that was politically impossible. His many friends in Congress could protect him from the vengeful types in the military, but they didn't have enough clout to go over their heads, especially at his age. He didn't care, he'd got what he wanted -- a chance to go to the stars. He only half-listened as General Winthrop dropped his formal tone and verbally lashed out at him.
"...and I'm goddamned glad you're going. You've been a goddamn thorn in the flesh of every goddamned Air Force Chief of Staff since you were twenty-three, starting with my father, General Beauregard Darlington Winthrop the Second. I don't know why you stayed in the goddamned Air Force anyway after that stupid goddamned trick you pulled in 1998 when you were a goddamned Captain.
"'Why don't we test out the laser forts by using them to push a sail-probe to the nearest stars?' you said. Unfortunately, my father agreed with you and approved the test. You made a fool out of him when ten percent of the nation's defense capability failed in the first goddamned minute..."
"...As it would have if it'd been a real attack instead of a test," George reminded him, uncowed.
"ALL RIGHT!!!" shouted the General. "Since then you've been protected by your goddamn friends in the goddamn Congress. I can't touch you, but I don't have to promote you any GODDAMN faster than necessary."
He subsided and sat back in his chair. He smiled grimly. "You realize that if you accept this appointment, Colonel Gudunov, you'll be going on an expedition from which you'll never return. There will be life-extending drugs available, but at your age there is no chance of you ever coming back."
George looked at General Winthrop with a slight air of bewilderment. He then realized that even though the General had been well-briefed on the interstellar mission, he apparently had not allowed himself to recognize the full truth about the expedition.
"Sir..." said George, hesitantly, "As planned -- the mission will take over sixty years. Forty years to get there and twenty years of exploration. Even with life-extending drugs, most of the crew will be old and well into retirement age before the work there is done. Besides, there is no provision for a return flight. This first expedition is a one-way mission."
Hearing, but refusing to hear at the same time, General Winthrop brushed off George's statement and launched into the final sentences that he had been saving.