"Frank Herbert - Escape Felicity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

Escape Felicity

Frank Herbert, 1966




'An escape-proof prison cannot be built,' he kept telling himself. His name was Roger Beirut, five feet
tall, one hundred and three pounds, crewcut black hair, a narrow face with a long nose and wide mouth
and space-bleached eyes that appeared to reflect rather than absorb what they saw.

Beirut knew his prison - the D-Service. He had got himself rooted down in the Service like a remittance
man half asleep in a hammock on some palm-shaded tropical beach, telling himself his luck would change
some day and he'd get out of there.

He didn't delude himself that a one-man D-ship was a hammock, or that space was a tropical beach.
But the sinecure element was there and the ships were solicitous cocoons, each with a climate designed
precisely for the lone occupant.

That each pilot carried the prison's bars in his mind had taken Beirut a long time to understand. Out here
aimed into the void beyond Capella Base, he could feel the bars where they had been dug into his
psyche, cemented and welded there. He blamed the operators of Bu-psych and the deep-sleep hypnotic
debriefing after each search trip. He told himself that Bu-psych did something to the helpless pilots then
installed this compulsion they called thePush.

Some young pilots managed to escape it for a while - tougher psyches, probably, but sooner or later,
Bu-psych got them all. It was a common compulsion that limited the time a D-ship pilot could stay out
before he turned tail and fled for home.

'This time I'll break away,' Beirut told himself. He knew he was talking aloud, but he had his computer's
vocoders turned off and his absent mumblings would be ignored.

The gas cloud of Grand Nuage loomed ahead of him, clearly defined on his instruments like a piece of
torn fabric thrown across the stars. He'd come out of subspace dangerously close, but that was the
gamble he'd taken.

Bingaling Benar, fellow pilot and sometime friend, had called him nuts when Beirut had said he was going
to tackle the cloud.

'Didn't you do that once before?' Bingaling asked.

'I was going to once, but I changed my mind,' Beirut had said.

'You gotta slow down, practically crawl in there,' Bingaling had said. 'I stood it in eighty-one days, man.
I had the push for real - couldn't take any more and I came home. Anyway, it's nothing but cloud all the
way through.'
Bingaling'sendless cloud was growing larger in the ship's instruments now. But the cloud enclosed a
mass of space that could hide a thousand suns.

Eighty-one days,he thought.