"Martin H. Greenberg - Christmas on Ganymede and Other StoriesUC - Compilation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenberg Martin H)

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To Hell with the Stars
Jack McDevitt
Christmas night.
Will Cutler couldn't get the sentient ocean out of his mind. Or the creature who wanted only to serve man. Or the curious chess game in the portrait that hung in a deserted city on a world halfway across the galaxy. He drew up his knees, propped the book against them, and let his head sink back into the pillows. The sky was dark through the plexidome. It had been snowing most of the evening, but the clouds were beginning to scatter. Orion's belt had appeared, and the lovely double star of Earth and Moon floated among the luminous branches of Granpop's elms. Soft laughter and conversation drifted up the stairs.
The sounds of the party seemed far away, and the Space Beagle rode a column of flame down into a silent desert. The glow from the reading lamp was bright on the inside of his eyelids. He broke the beam with
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his hand, and it dimmed and went out.
The book lay open at his fingertips.
It was hard to believe they were a thousand years old, these stories that were so full of energy and so unlike anything he'd come across before: tales of dark, alien places and gleaming temples under other stars and expeditions to black holes. They don't write like that anymore. Never had, during his lifetime. He'd read some other books from the classical Western period, some Dickens, some Updike, people like that. But these: what was there in the last thousand years to compare with this guy Bradbury?
The night air felt good. It smelled of pine needles and scorched wood and bayberry. And maybe of dinosaurs and rocket fuel.
His father might have been standing at the door for several minutes. "Goodnight, Champ," he whispered, lingering.
"I'm awake, Dad."
He approached the bed. "Lights out already?" he asked. "It's still early." His weight pressed down the mattress.
Will was slow to answer. "I know."
His father adjusted the sheet, pulling it up over the boy's shoulders. "It's supposed to get cold tonight," he said. "Heavy snow by morning." He picked up the book and, without looking at it, placed it atop the night table.
"Dad." The word stopped the subtle shift of weight that would precede the gentle pressure of his father's hand against his shoulder, the final act before withdrawal. "Why didn't we ever go to the stars?"
He was older than most of the other kids' dads.
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There had been a time when Will was ashamed of that. He couldn't play ball and he was a lousy hiker. The only time he'd tried to walk out over the Rise, they'd had to get help to bring him home. But he laughed a lot, and he always listened. Will was reaching an age at which he understood how much that counted for. "It costs a lot of money, Will. It's just more than we can manage. You'll be going to Earth in two years to finish school."
The boy stiffened. "Dad, I mean the stars. Alpha Centauri, Vega, the Phoenix NebulaЧ"
"The Phoenix Nebula? I don't think I know that one."
"It's in a story by a man named Clarke. A Jesuit goes there and discovers something terribleЧ"
The father listened while Will outlined the tale in a few brief sentences. "I don't think," he said, "your mother would approve of your reading such things."
"She gave me the book," he said, smiling softly.
"This one?" It was bound irt cassilate, a leather substitute, and its title appeared in silver script: Great Tales of the Space Age. He picked it up and looked at it with amusement. The names of the editors appeared on the spine: Asimov and Greenberg. "I don't think we realized, uh, that it was like that. Your mother noticed that it was one of the things they found in the time vault on the Moon a couple of years ago. She thought it would be educational."
"You'd enjoy it, Dad."
His father nodded and glanced at the volume. "What's the Space Age?"
"It's the name that people of the classical period used to refer to their own time. It has to do with the early exploration of the solar system, and the first
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manned flights. And, I think, the idea that we were going to the stars."
A set of lights moved slowly through the sky. "Oh," his father said. "Well, people have had a lot of strange ideas. History is full of dead gods and formulas to make gold and notions that the world was about to end." He picked up the book, adjusted the lamp, and opened to the contents page. His gray eyes ran down the listings, and a faint smile played about his lips. "The truth of it, Will, is that the stars are a pleasant dream, but no one's ever going out to them."
"Why not?" Will was puzzled at the sound of irritation in his own voice. He was happy to see that his father appeared not to have noticed.
"They're too far. They're just too far." He looked up through the plexidome at the splinters of light. "These people, Greenberg and Asimov: they lived, what, a thousand years ago?"
"Twentieth, twenty-first century. Somewhere in there."
"You know that new ship they're using in the outer System? The Explorer?"
"Fusion engines," said the boy.
"Yes. Do you know what its top recorded speed is?"
"About a hundred fifty thousand miles an hour."
"Much faster than anything this Greenberg ever saw. Anyhow, if they'd launched an Explorer to Alpha Centauri at the time these stories were written, at that speed, do you know how much of the distance they would have covered by now?"
Will had no idea. He would have thought they'd have arrived long ago, but he could see that wasn't going to be the answer. His father produced a mini-comp, pushed a few buttons, and smiled. "About five
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percent. The Explorer would need another eighteen-thousand years to get there."
"Long ride," said Will grudgingly.
"You'd want to take a good book."
The boy was silent.
"It's not as if we haven't tried, Will. There's an artificial world, half-built, out beyond Mars someplace. They were going to send out a complete colony, people, farm animals, lakes, forest, everything."
"What happened?"
"It's too far. Hell, Will, life is good here. People are happy. There's plenty of real estate in the solar system if folks want to move. In the end, there weren't enough volunteers for the world-ship. I mean, what's the point? The people who go would be depriving their kids of any kind of normal life. How would you feel about living inside a tube for a lifetime? No beaches. Not real ones anyhow. No sunlight. No new places to explore. And for what? The payoff is so far down the road that, in reality, there is no payoff."
"In the stories," Will said, "the ships are very fast."