"Leinster, Murray - The Journey UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)
The drive was off. It had been in his ears every second of the time since leaving Earth. Now it had stopped.
The Mavourneen had landed on Pluto.
Joe continued to swab. But his feelings were remarkable.
During Ms next watch, the unloading of cargo on Pluto began. The ship was sealed to the ground by a wall attached to the rounded hull at the top, and to the landing-platform at the bottom. It was made of stuff squirted out of hoses, which hardened where it landed and almost as it splashed. It was water, mined at the end of one of the galleries leading in all directions from the underground settlement. It made an airtight connection of the ship to the ground. In thick work jackets, the crew of the Mavourneen unloaded cargo in this temporary ice-walled cavern. Then- breaths were frosty in the glare of the unloading-lights. The cargo vanished into shafts going down into the village.
In his watch off, Joe was given shore-leave. He was permitted to go down to the village on Pluto. There were nearly two thousand people here, and ships came fairly often. There was no loneliness. The folk who lived here felt no such hunger for talk as Joe felt. They had a reasonably spacious community, with metal walls and ceilings-mostly painted white-and they had .shops and homes, and life went orr very comfortably. The ah" had a peculiar, invigorating smell to it, because of the hydroponic gardens which grew fresh vegetables. It was warmer, too, than on the ship. The community had an atom pile for power, and mined uranium as part of its way of life. Part of the cargo for Earth was pigs of uranium.
The only thing Joe could really note down as distinctive was that the settlement was warmer than he was at all used to. Otherwise the feel of things was like that in a medium-sized village, assuming only that it lived in a single apartment house and that all the time was night. -That was because all the light was artificial. But this did not seem strange to Joe. He had seen no other sort of light all the way out on the ship.
He bought souvenirs for his parents-minerals, and some of those inexplicable fossil-bearing lumps of transparent rock that are familiar enough in museums. There was no other distinctive local product to buy. The settlement on Pluto was small, but it was prosperous and up-to-date. The only thing in the least backward about it was the visi-screen shows. They were brought out recorded on tape, and Joe had seen all of them.
Just before the last of the ship's cargo was unloaded, Joe
broke his arm. It was one of those unforeseeable accidents. A cargo sling let go the fraction of a second before it should have. A bale came tumbling, and Joe tried to stop it with a cargo hook, and the bale was heavier than it should have been. His arm was flicked aside with a deceptive gentleness, and he felt the bones snap.
It was nothing very serious. There was a hospital, of course, where highly professional X-rays determined the exact damage, and a perfectly competent surgeon pinned the bones, put the arm in a light plastic cast, and told Joe he was quite fit for light duty. Even the first mate took it casually.
"I'll give you second steward rating on the way back," he said matter-of-factly. "That'll mean a little better pay, even. You wait on table and help the cook for the officers' mess."
"But the work I was doing-"
"A second steward's signing off," said the mate. "Hell stay out here between ships. Good pay in the mines. And there's a man wants to get back to Earth. He's made a stake. His papers say he's an engineer, third, but he'll go back as spaceman, second class."
And that was that. There was no passenger traffic to Pluto. There was nothing to see. While the ship was aground Joe never saw the surface, and aside from the souvenir minerals the only oddity he remembered was the warm, man-made climate.
He was helping the cook with the officers' mess when the Mavourneen took off again. He felt the cotton-wooly sensation in his ears when the drive warmed up, and he knew the moment of take-off because the sound changed. And of course he knew it would no longer be possible to go down into the underground settlement on his watch off. But that was all. He regretted that he hadn't been able to see the ice seal melted down by space-suited figures using torches to melt the ship free. The water would have frozen again instantly, of course. Then the walls would be broken up and taken down into the village to be used again later.
But when the Mavourneen was only two hours out from Pluto, bound back to Earth, Joe had the first inkling of the event that was to make his whole journey remarkable. The first mate brought a girl into the kitchen and said briefly:
'This is Miss Alice Cawdor. She rates as supernumerary
steward. The skipper had orders to bring her to Earth if she wanted to make the trip. See that she has meals. She isn't required to do any work, but if she wants to, she may."
He went away. The girl said politely:
"How do you do?"
She looked at Joe with a friendly reserve which was exactly the way a small-town girl looks at people she has not met before. Not suspicious, and not stand-offish, but like somebody who's known the same people all her life, and knows that some new people will become her friends and some won't. Joe had been pretty lonely on Pluto, and he'd expected to be lonely on the way back. He found himself hoping that this girl would decide he was worth making friends with.
Back on Earth his father and mother were beginning to talk about taking a vacation somewhere. They needed it. Joe's father was drawn pretty fine, now, and his mother had had to take in all her clothes. There could be no communication by radio beyond a distance to be measured in thousands of miles. The distance to where Joe was was thousands of millions of miles. So there would be no word from or about Joe until his ship got back. The next three and a half months were going to be hard to last through.
Joe's new duties as a second steward were easier than those of a spaceman, second class. He set the table for the officers and put the food on it. He took out the dishes and put them in the washer. Later he stacked them. He did some polishing of cutlery and pans. Not much. The girl stayed in an empty cabin most of the time. She came and got her meals from the kitchen and took them to her cabin to eat, alone. She was pleasant, but reserved.
During the first week, though, she did ask Joe if there were any books or vision-tapes to read or look at. He found some for her and set up a small tape-viewer for her to watch the vision-tapes in. He mentioned one record he thought she'd like.
Joe worked in the kitchen and served the officers' meals.
He thought often and deeply about the stars. He set a table and cleared it and put dishes in a washer and later stacked them. Once he thought about the profession he had studied to practice. He also thought about the vision-reels in the ship's library, and the books, and picked out some others for the girl to see when she wanted them.
Two weeks out of Pluto they were talking about other subjects than books and vision-reels. With a little embarrassment she told him she'd been bom on Pluto and had lived all her life in the underground settlement there.
"My mother got tired of it, finally," she said. "She used to get homesick for Earth. I don't remember, but she made my father promise that he'd send me back to Earth to see it, anyway, before I married somebody out there."
"Have you picked him out?" asked Joe.
She shook her head.
By the time they passed the orbit of Neptune they were friends. And Joe knew that she'd estimated him carefully before she gave him her friendship. He felt that the honor was great. His selection of vision-reels and books became even more painstaking. But they talked quite a lot. Sometimes about the stars outside the ship. She had never seen the stars, either.
"You'll see them on Earth," Joe promised. "You'll see
them every night."
She said uncomfortably:
"Night ... It must be strange. That's when there isn't any light. And the stars are in the sky . . ."She said uncertainly. "I can't imagine what a sky is like. My father says there isn't any ceiling over your head ..."
Joe looked at her in astonishment. Then he realized. He, himself, had not seen a sky for nearly five months. She had never seen one. She had never been out-of-doors. Not that she had suffered physically from the fact. Lamps supplied needed ultraviolet in the ship, and certainly in the settlement on Pluto.
"And sunshine," she added uneasily. "It's yellow, isn't it? I wonder what 111 look like in-daylight?"
Joe tried to tell her. He was very earnest about it. But when he was by himself, sometimes he doubted the accuracy of the descriptions he gave her. It had been a long time since he'd seen a sky or the sun or trees, or grass, or even the
stars as they look from the bottom of Earth's ocean of air.
The Mavourneen floated on through emptiness toward Earth. Around her the stars shone by myriads of myriads. Some were brighter than others, and some were yellow and some were blue and pink and even green. But none was larger than any other. All were pinpoints-unwinking and infinitely small.
All but the sun.
That had visibly a disk when the Mavourneen crossed the orbit of Uranus. Not that Joe saw the planet, nor did Alice Cawdor, the girl. As a matter of fact, Uranus was around on the other side of the sun and was not seen even by the officers and crew-members who had occasion to enter the control room and look out of its ports. Saturn was visible, but the ship would not pass within hundreds of millions of miles of it. There was not much excitement even in duty in " the control room of the Mavourneen.
The firmament gave no impression of distance. It looked like an all-encompassing backdrop in which someone had prickled countless tiny holes through which lights shone. There was the sun ahead, but it was merely a distinct bright light of small but appreciable size. Navigating the Mavourneen was merely a matter of working controls so that dials would read what mathematics said they should. One had no feeling of movement or adventure.
The ship passed the orbit of Saturn. Baek on Earth, Joe's mother began to find it more difficult to sleep. Joe might be home in two months more. If nothing had happened . . . Joe's father smoked too much. But he would have grinned at the suggestion that he worried about Joe. Joe was all right. Of course!
Then Jupiter and the sun and the Mavourneen were at the three corners of an equilateral triangle, if anybody cared. The ship had been decelerating for a long time when she reached that point and kept on sunward toward the orbit of Mars. She continued to decelerate. The only noteworthy thing that turned up in Joe's life was that he discovered Alice did not know that on Earth everybody went to sleep at night. Without really thinking about it, she'd assumed that life on Earth was like life on Pluto, and that people were awake and slept in shifts-as on Pluto-and that there was always brightness outside one's room and somebody up and
about and working- or amusing themselves. She found it frightening to think of everybody asleep at once. It seemed to her that somebody ought to be on duty to make sure there was light and keat and air. Qn Pluto there was.
Joe felt a sort of compassionate protectiveness toward her now. He told her about his family, and assured her that his mother would instantly invite her to visit and grow used to Earth in his home. She had been bound for some institutional hotel where she would be properly guarded against her unsophistication in Earth customs.
They passed the orbit of Mars.
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