"Joe Haldeman - The Forever War (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

THE FOREVER WAR
7
light, stressed permaplast over his head like an umbrella. They were dry and clean. I wondered
aloud what they had done to deserve it, and Rogers suggested a couple of colorful, but unlikely,
possibilities.
We were going back to stand by the next stringer when the field first (name of Dougeistein, but we
called him
"Awright") blew a whistle and bellowed, "Awright, soldier boys and girls, ten minutes. Smoke'em if
you got 'em." He reached into his pocket and turned on the control that heated our coveralls.
Rogers and I sat down on our end of the stringer and I took out my weed box. I had lots of joints,
but we were ordered not to smoke them until after night-chop. The only tobacco I had was a cigarro
butt about three inches long. I lit it on the side of the box; it wasn't too bad after the first
couple of puffs. Rogers took a puff, just to be sociable, but made a face and gave it back.
"Were you in school when you got drafted?" she asked.
"Yeah. Just got a degree in physics. Was going after a teacher's certificate."
She nodded soberly. "I was in biology . . ."
"Figures." I ducked a handful of slush. "How far?"
"Six years, bachelor's and technicaL" She slid her boot along the ground, turning up a ridge of
mud and slush the consistency of freezing ice milk. "Why the fuck did this have to happen?"
I shrugged. It didn't call for an answer, least of all the answer that the UNEF kept giving us.
Intellectual and physical elite of the planet, going out to guard humanity against the Tairan
menace. Soyashit It was all just a big experiment See whether we could goad the Taurans into
ground

Awright blew the whistle two minutes early, as expected, but Rogers and I and the other two
stringers got to sit for a minute while the epoxy and floor teams finished covering our stringer.
It got cold fast, sitting there with our suits turned off, but we remained inactive on principle.
There really wasn't any sense in having us train in the cold. Typical army half-logic. Sure, it
was going to be cold where we were going, but not ice-cold or snow-cold. Al-
8
Joe Haldeman

most by definition, a portal planet remained within a degree or two of absolute zero all the tune-
since collapsars don't shine-and the first chill you felt would mean that you were a dead man.
Twelve years before, when I was ten years old, they had discovered the collapsar jump. Just fling
an object at a collapsar with sufficient speed, and out it pops in some other part of the galaxy.
It didn't take long to figure out the formula that predicted where it would come out: it travels
along the same "line" (actually an Einsteinian geodesic) it would have followed if the collapsar
hadn't been in the way-until it reaches another collapsar field, whereupon it reappears, repelled
with the same speed at which it approached the original collapsar. Travel time between the two
collapsars.. . exactly zero.
It made a lot of work for mathematical physicists, who had to redefine simultaneity, then tear
down general relativity and build it back up again. And it made the politicians very happy,
because now they could send a shipload of colonists to Fomaihaut for less than it had once cost to
put a brace of men on the moon. There were a lot of people the politicians would love to see on
Fomalbaut, implementing a glorious adventure rather than stirring up trouble at home.


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