"Zach Hughes - Deep Freeze" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

"I see."

"And when you hit it you started the computer working on charts for
the other side of the galaxy."

"Mummmmph," Fran said.

"The computers couldn't locate us because it was looking for us on the
wrong charts."

The Rimfire charts were so voluminous that they had been clouded in
sectors. Rimfire, in her time the most advanced ship in the fleet of the
Department of Exploration and Alien Search, had circumnavigated the
galaxy, making short excursions into promising looking areas along the
periphery. She had marked her trail carefully with blink beacons. With her
charts it was possible for a ship, even a small, antiquated Mule like Dan
and Fran's Old Folks, to blink all the way around the disc of the Milky Way
in a few hundred settings of the generator.

At first it had been a bit spooky making the long, long jumps outside
the disc of the galaxy. Even a gentleman amateur space traveler like Dan
Webster knew the fundamental rules governing the use of a blink
generator. Rule number one: Never blink into the unknown. Odd things
happen when a ship traveling in that never-never land that is outside of
but concurrent with space and time comes into contact with an object of
mass. Certain alterations in molecular bondings merge the two masses.

Everyone who had ever read anything about space travel had seen the
pictures of the two known incidents of a blinking ship fusing with another
body. In sculptured detail the sleek prow of a small X&A cruiser protruded
from the iron-black, metallic mass of an asteroid. In even more dramatic
pictures the colonizer ship Vulpecula Columbus was shown blended with a
smaller merchantman. Bonding with a chunk of rock, an iron asteroid, or
any sizable body contacted in non-space was a terminal process for human
life.

Unless X&A had laid down blink beacons one never blinked beyond the
range of the ship's eyes. So, at first, making those megaleaps out there in
the blackness of intergalactic space had been spooky, with Old Folks
reluctant to leave the frail security of a blink beacon from which the view
of the galaxy was more than spectacular. Off on the port quarter could be
seen the galaxy's hot heart bulging in a globular mass from the slightly
tilted plane of the disc. Later, as Dan grew more accustomed to blinks
measured in parsecs, he was tempted to follow Rimfire's trail all the way
around the galaxy.

"Be something, Mama, to say we've made it all the way. Not many can
say that."