"GRAF, L. A - STAR TREK ROUGH TRAILS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Graf L A)

mask as he gestured toward the open door. "Feel free to take the
message down yourself, C.C." if you want to. We won't try to stop
you."

And they might even help me on my way, Chekov thought, remembering
Baldwin's previous push. He reached for the nearest lifeline and
clipped it on a little more quickly than dignity allowed. Even the
howl of Belle Terre's dust storm wasn't loud enough to drown out the
resulting shout of mocking laughter.

"Uhura to Sulu. Come in, Sulu."

LThura had said the phrase so often over the past five weeks that by
now the words slid out of her mouth without the slightest effort@r
attention-wn her part. She pressed the correct transmission key on her
experimental communications panel, paused for the appropriate time
afterward to allow a reply to come through, but no longer really
listened for an answer to her call because no answer had ever come.
"Auditory feedback fatigue" had been the official term for it back at
Starfleet Academy. out here, on the nebulous fringes of known space,
people just called it communications burnout. It was a condition most
often seen in the crew of disabled ships who spent so long listening
for an answer to their distress calls that they missed hearing it when
it actually came.

"Uhura to Sulu. Come in, Sulu."

Uhura had recognized the syndrome in herself about two weeks ago and
been horrified. Her entire career in Starfleet was based on her
ability to listen. She knew she had a keener ear than many other
communications officers, and she prided herself on her ability to
thread out a signal buried in electromagnetic noise, or hear the barest
scratch of a message through the resounding silence of subspace.
Finding herself adrift in a numb haze of not listening, not even sure
how many hours she had spent repeating the same six words without
paying attention to them, had shaken her professional confidence right
down to the bone. Could something as simple as futility really
overcome all those years of training and experience?

"Uhura to Sulu." She fiddled with the gain on the transmitter to keep
herself alert, watching the transmission histogram on her monitor spike
into alarmed red then fade back to green as the computer compensated
for the adjustment she'd made. The reception histogram, which was
supposed to display the frequencies of Sulu's response to her hail,
remained a dull, flat lined gray, just as it had since the first day
she started hailing him.

A burst of imitation momentarily clawed a hole through Uhura's boredom.
There was absolutely no reason this experimental communications system
shouldn't be working. The pall of olivium-con tan-(Inated dust that