"James E. Gunn - Station In Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gunn James E)

Probably it didn't mean anything. We all have our doubles. I could have been mistaken.

But it started me remembering and thinking.

The first thing the rocket experts had to consider was expense. They didn't have the money. The second
thing was weightтАФeven a medium-sized man is heavy when rocket payloads are reckoned, and the
stores and equipment essential to his survival are many times heavier.

If Rev had escaped alive, why had they announced that he was dead? But I knew the question was all
wrong.

If my speculations were right, Rev had never been up there at all. The essential payload was only a
thirty-day recording and a transmitter. Even if the major feat of sending up a manned rocket was beyond
their means and their techniques, they could send up that much.

Then they got the money; they got the volunteers and the techniques.

I suppose the telemetered reports from the rocket helped. But what they accomplished in thirty days was
an unparalleled miracle.

The timing of the recording must have taken months of work; but the vital part of the scheme was
secrecy. General Finch had to know and CaptainтАФnow ColonelтАФPickrell. A few othersтАФworkmen,
administratorsтАФand Rev. . .

What could they do with him? Disguise him? Yes. And then hide him in the biggest city in the world. They
would have done it that way.

It gave me a funny, sick kind of feeling, thinking about it. Like everybody else, I don't like to be taken in
by a phony plea. And this was a fraud perpetrated on all humanity.

Yet it had led us to the planets. Perhaps it would lead us beyond, even to the stars. I asked myself: could
they have done it any other way?

I would like to think I was mistaken. This myth has become part of us. We lived through it ourselves,
helped make it. Someday, I tell myself, a spaceman whose reverence is greater than his obedience will
make a pilgrimage to that swift shrine and find only an empty shell.

I shudder then.

This pulled us together. In a sense, it keeps us together. Nothing is more important than that.
I try to convince myself that I was mistaken. The straight black hair was gray at the temples now and cut
much shorter. The mustache was gone. The Clark Gable ears were flat to the head; that's a simple
operation, I understand.

But grins are hard to change. And anyone who lived through those thirty days will never forget that voice.

I think about Rev and the life he must have now, the things he loved and can never enjoy again, and I
realize perhaps he made the greater sacrifice.

I think sometimes he must wish he were really in the cave of night, seated in that icy control chair 1,075