"Jack C. Haldeman II & Jack Dann - High Steel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Jack C)

He was still angry with himself because he hadn't stood up to the Trans-United bureaucrat. The sense
that he had betrayed something important weighed heavily upon him, yet on another level he felt there had
been no choice. It was a bitter feeling. He was no better than the others.
He was a hypocrite.


2
It was the first time John had been inside the computer bubble, the mobile command center for this
operation. He wouldn't be there now if Sam hadn't talked him into it. Sam was a friend of Carl Hegyer,
who was running the board. The bubble hung well away from the station; they had a panoramic view.
Sam had thought John might like to watch the spin from there. He admitted it was better than being with
the brass in the center of the station, or watching it with the drunken revelers in the geodesic.
Spin was imparted to the station by an extremely simple and cheap method. The surface of the station
was covered with thousands of small, one-shot aluminum-trioxide rockets. The crew called them
sparklers. They were dirty, but that didn't matter in space. What mattered was that they were cheap,
composed of elements easily mined at the lunar complexes.
Through the programmed computer, Carl Hegyer could select the number and order of rocket firings.
They would fire only a few at first, to get the station moving. Slowly they would increase the rotation by
firing more and more rockets until the desired rate of spin was achieved. The point they were aiming for
was that which would produce a fifty-g force at the rounded ends of the station. That would still leave the
majority of rockets in reserve. The immediate area had been cleared in preparation for the firing. The
geodesic party, still in full swing, had been unlocked from the station and moved a short distance away.
Most of the brass and dirtwalkers were in the swollen living quarters in the middle of the station.
The digital mounted next to the CRT screen on Carl's console ticked down. A signal flare soared
across the darkness like an orange comet. The two-minute warning.
Carl broke the silence in the bubble. "All this will probably seem pretty anticlimactic," he said. "I'm not
much more than the guy that pushes the plunger. It starts slow. Not much to see at first."
He was right. When the digital ran down to zero, John had difficulty even seeing the rockets fire. Carl
pointed to a few scattered dots on the station's image on the CRT screen. "Those are the rockets firing,"
he said. "We ought to be seeing something soon."
John looked out the large, curved port at the station. There were more rockets firing now, sending out
white sparks like small magnesium flares. As he watched, one edge of the station occulted a star. It was
moving. Still slow, but the movement was perceptible.
Although John had worked on several projects since his training, this was the first time he had seen his
handiwork put into motion. It impressed him, moved him, touched something deep in his heart.
For this was wasicun, the work of the white man. Yet somehow, as the ponderous station gradually
picked up speed with its trail of metallic sparks, it seemed more like the work of the People.
There was symmetry here, balance, purpose. There were circles linked with the circle of the Earth.
For a moment he forgot about the dirtwalkers on the station, the brawling party in the geodesic, the
drunks and whores. Here was purpose, direction, in a fluid way. Relationships were being expressed that
he could only guess at, not yet hold.
"It's beautiful," Sam said softly.
John could only nod. Carl was busy at the console, fingers flying over the keyboard. Once in a while
he would touch the CRT with a lightpen, triggering an individual rocket passed over.
It was going faster now, as fast as John had ever seen anything swing in space. He knew the station
needed fifty g's at the ends, zero-g at the center. It was necessary for the centrifugation and sedimentation
of the material they were manufacturing. That seemed like a lot of g-forces, but the station was large,
strong. It would handle it.
John saw it first, looking through the port. Carl saw it an instant later, through the computer. An
unevenness, a ripple spread through the pattern of the firing rockets. Suddenly the board went wild,