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

"I can think of other things I'd rather say," Fran said.

Old Folks was out there in the big dark because Dan Webster wasn't
ready to don house slippers and become an old man. He had worked
sixty-five years with United Tigian Shipping, a firm that sent ships
blinking out to every inhabited world in the United Planets sector. He had
started with the company as a trainee bookkeeper and had retired a vice
president with a desire to do something other than take up a hobby and
wait for his personal support system to begin to malfunction. To his
surprise and pleasure, it was Fran who suggested, "Papa, why don't we do
some traveling?"

The ship had made a ninety-degree arc around the periphery from its
point of exit opposite Tigian II. Back there on the "world" the Webster
home was sealed against intruders, climate conditioned against damp or
dry or mildew or gnawing insects. It could be opened only by a voice
command from Dan or, in the event of necessity, an override of the
security system directed by the eldest Webster son.

They had spent two months on Xanthos, the U.P. administration
planet, fighting government red tape to get the final permits on the
reconditioned space tug, and then they had done some simple blinking,
following well established routes toward the periphery. And now Old Folks
was a long way from home and had made a shallow penetration into an
area of thinly placed stars. She rested within visual range of the blink
beacon that marked Rimfire's deepest excursion into the disc at that
point.

"Well, Mama," Dan said, after the computer had located them
precisely, showing Old Folks as a blinking dot amid a field of scattered
stars, "where do we go from here?"

Fran shrugged.

"You've always been the lucky one," Dan said. "Pick us a winner."

"There," Fran whispered, as if in doubt. She pointed out a grouping of
stars a few parsecs toward galactic center.

"There it shall be," Dan said.

They didn't even have names, that grouping of seven stars toward
which Old Folks made her slow way. Masses of stars and interstellar
matter blocked them from the telescopes on the U.P. worlds. They showed
on the new Rimfire charts, but there had been no attempt by Captain
Julie Roberts or her scientific team to name the millions of stars recorded
by the ship's instruments.

Dan didn't know the procedures for naming new stars, and he didn't
give it too much thought beyond an idle speculation that it would be nice