"David Langford - The Spear of the Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Langford David)

travelling out with him. Father Brown knew the generous wrath of simple men, and tried to spread a little
calm by enquiring about the space-walk in which several of the passengers had indulged earlier.
Though allowing himself to be diverted for a little time, Horne presently said, "Don't you feel a shade
hot under the dog-collar when Astron needles you about his Religion of Science and how outdated you
are?"
"Oh yes, science progresses most remarkably," said Father Brown with bumbling enthusiasm. "In Sir
Isaac Newton's mechanics, you know, it was the three-body problem that didn't have any general
solution. Then came Relativity and it was the two-body problem that was troublesome. After that,
Quantum Theory found all these complications in the one-body problem, a single particle; and now they
tell me that relativistic quantum field theory is stuck at the nobody problem, the vacuum itself. I can hardly
wait to hear what tremendous step comes next."
Horne looked at him a little uncertainly.
A silvery chime sounded. "Attention, attention. This is the captain speaking. Dinner will be served at
six bells. Shortly beforehand there will be a course correction with a temporary boost of acceleration
from five-eighths to fifteen-sixteenths g."
"I go," said Astron with a kind of stately anger, drawing himself up to his full, impressive height and
pulling the deep white cowl of the robe over his head. "I go to be alone and meditate over the Sacred
Flame." With Traill cowled likewise in his wake, he stalked gigantically from the lounge.
"That makes me madder than anything," Horne said gloomily, beginning to amble in the general
direction of Elizabeth Brayne. "No pipes, no cigarettes, that's an iron ruleтАФand he manages to wangle an
eternal flame in his ruddy stateroom. The safety officer would like to kill him."
But it was not the safety officer who came under suspicion when the news raced through the
Aquinas like leaves in a mad March wind: that a third lieutenant making final checks before the course
change had used a master key and found that great robed figure slumped over the brazier of the
Universal Flame, face charred and flowing hair gone to smoke, a scientific seeker who had solved the
no-body problem at last.
By a happy chance, ship security had been contracted out to the agency of M. Hercule Flambeau,
one-time master criminal and an old friend of Father Brown, who set to in a frenzy of Gallic fervour.
Knowing the pudgy little priest's power of insight, Flambeau invited him at once to the chamber of death.
It was a stark and austere stateroom, distinguished by the wide brazier (its gas flame now extinguished)
and the terrible figure that the third lieutenant had dragged from the fire.
"He seems to have bent over his wretched flame and prayed, or whatever mumbo-jumbo the cult of
Fire uses for prayer," mused Father Brown. "Better for him to have looked up and not down, and
savoured the stars through that porthole . . . Even the stars look twisted in this accursed place. Might he
have died naturally and fallen? That would be ugly enough, but not devilish."
The tall Flambeau drew out a slip of computer paper. "My friend, we know to distrust coincidence.
The acolyte Traill is nowhere to be found, and the ship's records say the nearest airlock has cycled just
once, outwards, since Astron left the main lounge an hour ago. Some avenger has made a clean sweep of
the Church of Fire's mission: one dead in a locked room, one jettisoned. And half the women and all the
men out there might have had a potent motive. We're carrying members of rival cults tooтАФthe Club of
Queer Trades, the Dead Men's Shoes Society, the Ten Teacups, and heaven knows what else. But how
in God's name could any of them get in here?"
"Don't forget the crabbed priesthood that blights human souls," said the smaller man earnestly.
"Astron was last seen attacking it with a will, and its representative has an obviously criminal face. Ecce
homo." He tapped himself on the chest.
"Father Brown, I cannot believe you did this thing."
"Well, in confidence, I'll admit to you that I didn't." He bustled curiously about the room, blinking at
the oversized bed and peering again through the viewport as though the stars themselves held some
elusive clue. Last of all he studied the robed corpse's ruined face and pale hands, and shuddered.
"The spear of the sun," he muttered to himself. "Astron threatened his enemies with the spear of the