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

to name a real pretty one for Fran. He was too busy using the ship's
sensors and detectors to make sure that the next short blink didn't put Old
Folks into the nuclear furnace of a sun or merge her with a hard, cold
asteroid.

The real work began when the ship left Rimfire's well marked trail. The
blink generator aboard Old Folks had traveled not a few parsecs, for sure,
but it was solid and dependable and it was powerful, for the ship was a
space tug, built to take vessels a thousand times her mass into her
electronic embrace and blink them safely to the nearest shipyard. The
generator was capable of multiple short blinks without recharging, but
even so, she spent long hours drifting in the big empty while the generator
reached out to the odd mixture of magnetic and radioactive energy
emanating from the nearest star.

Since there was no real hurry, they didn't work in shifts. When it was
bedtime in the Western Standard Zone on Tigian II, they put the ship's
systems on auto and went to sleep. Dan Webster had always looked on
bedtime as one of the highlights of his day, for it meant cuddling up to the
sleek softness of the woman who had carried his children. Bedtime,
depending on Fran's hormonal state, could be a sweet, touching, drowsy
sinking into sleep or a mutually satisfying if ritualized romp which ended
with Fran making little moaning sounds and Dan laughing like a fool. He
always laughed because it was so very good. After so many years they read
each other's little signals, responded eagerly, and proved with surprising
regularity that youth had no monopoly on the pleasures of the flesh.

Old Folks was provisioned for a voyage of three years, with emergency
space rations for another half year. The Century 4000 held the largest
collection of books and films available from the Library of the
Confederation on Xanthos. Dan was in no hurry at all. He let the ship's
detection systems minutely search the space around a near star and
logged the results carefully into the computer's avid maw. It made him feel
good. He hadn't discovered anything, not yet, but he was the first man to
record that a particular star at a particular coordinate in space had no
spawn, that nothing orbited the nuclear furnace but a band of diffuse
gases and some almost undetectable floes of space dust.

Fran had attended a good school on Tigian II. Her degree was in the
field of literature. She had always felt a bit guilty as she reared her family
and made a home for them for not having continued her school days
delving into the "better" books produced by the writers of the hundreds of
worlds that made up the United Planets Confederation. She had promised
herself that she'd use the time in space to catch up on her reading, but so
far, she had not made it through one book. The stilted language didn't
ring well in her ears. The concerns of the writers of a thousand years in the
past seemed, in the light of real life, to be inconsequential. Now, as Old
Folks blinked in short jumps toward a G-class star a few light-years away
from the first sun examined by the ship's sensors, she decided that she
would do a paper for publication by her discussion group on the works