"Murray Leinster - First Contact (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

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First Contact


TOMMY DORT WENT into the captainтАЩs room with his last pair of stereophotos and said:
тАЬIтАЩm through, sir. These are the last two pictures I can take.тАЭ
He handed over the photographs and looked with professional interest at the visiplates
which showed all space outside the ship. Subdued, deep-red lighting indicated the controls and
such instruments as the quartermaster on duty needed for navigation of the spaceship Lianvabon.
There was a deeply cushioned control chair. There was the little gadget of oddly angled
mirrorsтАФremote descendant of the back-view mirrors of twentieth-century motoristsтАФwhich allowed a
view of all the visiplates without turning the head. And there were the huge plates which were so
much more satisfactory for a direct view of space.
The Lianvabon was a long way from home. The plates, which showed every star of visual
magnitude and could be stepped up to any desired magnification, portrayed stars of every
imaginable degree of brilliance, in the startlingly different colors they show outside of
atmosphere. But every one was unfamiliar. Only two constellations could be recognized as seen from
Earth, and they were shrunken and distorted. The Milky Way seemed vaguely out of place. But even
such oddities were minor compared to a sight in the forward plates.
There was a vast, vast mistiness ahead. A luminous mist. It seemed motionless. It took a
long time for any appreciable nearing to appear in the vision plates, though the spaceshipтАЩs
velocity indicator showed an incredible speed. The mist was the Crab Nebula, six light-years long,
three and a half light-years thick, with outward-reaching members that in the telescopes of Earth
gave it some resemblance to the creature for which it was named. It was a cloud of gas, infinitely
tenuous, reaching half again as far as from Sol to its nearest neighbor-sun. Deep within it burned
two stars; a double star; one component the familiar yellow of the sun of Earth, the other an
unholy white.
Tommy Dort said meditatively:
тАЬWeтАЩre heading into a deep, sir?тАЭ
The skipper studied the last two plates of TommyтАЩs taking, and put them aside. He went
back to his uneasy contemplation of the vision plates ahead. The Lianvabon was decelerating at
full force. She was a bare half light-year from the nebula. TommyтАЩs work was guiding the shipтАЩs
course, now, but the work was done. During all the stay of the exploring ship in the nebula, Tommy
Dort would loaf. But heтАЩd more than paid his way so far.
He had just completed a quite unique firstтАФa complete photographic record of the movement
of a nebula during a period of four thousand years, taken by one individual with the same
apparatus and with cdntrol exposures to detect and record any systematic errors. It was an
achievement in itself worth the journey from Earth. But in addition, he had also recorded four
thousand years of the history of a double star, and four thousand years of the history of a star
in the act of degenerating into a white dwarf.
It was not that Tommy Dort was four thousand years old. He was, actually, in his twenties.
But the Crab Nebula is four thousand light-years from Earth, and the last two pictures had been
taken by light which would not reach Earth until the sixth millennium A.D. On the way hereтАФat
speeds incredible multiples of the speed of lightтАФTommy Dort had recorded each aspect of the
nebula by the light which had left it from forty centuries since to a bare six months ago.
The Lianvabon bored on through space. Slowly, slowly, slowly, the incredible luminosity
crept across the vision plates. It blotted out half the universe from view. Before was glowing
mist, and behind was a star-studded emptiness. The mist shut off three-fourths of all the stars.
Some few of the brightest shone dimly through it near its edge, but only a few. Then there was