"Maxine McArthur - Time Future" - читать интересную книгу автора (McArthur Maxine)

most of our production capability and there is no longer any need for a
twenty-four-hour workforce. The majority of residents now follow the
same diurnal schedule. Earth's, for convenience, although our
orbit around the planet below is completed in about half that time.

I'm hungry, having forgotten to eat anything since lunch" yesterday.
I'm overdrawn in space rations, too, or I might have resorted to
ingesting my quota of those.

The ring lift jarred to a halt. I left it and threaded my way through
the morning crowd, fastening my jacket as I walked and trying vainly to
tidy my hair. I hope my face doesn't look as tired as I feel.

Fifteen pairs of eyes turned to watch me as the meeting room door
opened. I get this sort of intense regard much more as head of station
than I ever did as head of Engineering, and it still stops me
momentarily in my tracks.

"Commander Halley." Lieutenant Garnet, a trim woman with hair pulled
back tightly from her face, nodded to me from the far side of a round
table. I took my place next to Bill Murdoch, the burly head of
Security, and smiled a greeting to the others. Of the department heads
only Murdoch, my friend Eleanor Jago, the head of Medicine, and Veatch,
the station manager, had accepted the invitation to the briefing.
Eleanor, cool and tidy in her hospital whites, half-smiled back at me
but her glance was more professional than personal. Veatch stared back
impassively through alien eyes. The other participants were a mixture
of Earth Fleet scientific research, and Engineering staff.

Murdoch caught my eye as I looked around the table.

"You should have made it an order to come," he rumbled, leaning
sideways so no one else could hear. "You need to give people more
incentive."

I frowned. Surely a rare interstellar phenomenon was incentive enough?
And. I'd hinted at the prospects it offered us to break the siege.
Either the other department
heads hadn't understood, or they were becoming jaded by our frequent
failures.

The room darkened and in place of the panel lighting a starfield
blossomed brightly above the center of the table as Garnet activated a
holomap.

We could see an asteroid belt, one planet close enough to be warm and
hospitable, and two more far-off frozen ones orbited an unassuming
orange star. The Abelar system seemed to grow as the holomap's
magnification increased. A tiny disk representing Jocasta orbited the
inner planet. Nobody commented on the lack of correct scale-it felt