"John Morressy - Rimrunners Home" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morressy John)

Watts shook his head. "Nobody remembers what didn't happen, Van."

"So now there's talk of cutting the program. Is that it?"

"Not from anyone who matters."

"Sometimes you don't know who matters until it's too late."

"POP has friends, Van. You picked up a high-probable on this run, and we'll use
that against the jokers who tell people that the odds against another big hit
are a million to one. The program is safe."

Vanderhorst pushed himself up out of the chair. For an instant he was unsteady.
Watts started to assist him, but checked himself.

"I'm doing just fine, Bob," Vanderhorst said. "Is Reacculturation in the same
place as before?"

Watts nodded. "Second door on the left. Good to have you back, Van."

This was the best debriefing yet. Watts had kept it short and spoken straight.
Vanderhorst detested the assault of carefully researched obsolete terms that
some POP staffers memorized to put rimrunners at their ease. The artificial
speech was nothing more than a buffer, placing the staffers at a safe remove
from real contact.

Was it insensitivity, he wondered, or ignorance? Was it fear? Perhaps none of
the downsiders in POP really wanted to know how it felt to be out there alone,
ringing the solar system at half of lightspeed on a sixty-billion-mile circuit;
or what it was like to come back to new words, new ideas, a new society on each
return and never know what the reception was going to be.

Cutback talk was nothing new. On Vanderhorst's first return, there had been
riots and an attack on the launch complex, but all that frenzy had passed with
recovery from the depression of 2028. When he came back for the second time, in
'48, all was calm. The last time back, in '67, rimrunners were folk heroes. He
had been on the hollies every night for two weeks running. All three major
parties had approached him to stand for office in the '68 elections.

If he had stayed downside that last time, he would now be almost as old as
Watts. No, correct that. He would look almost as old. In fact he would be much
older. That was the unsettling part, that sight of an old acquaintance aged a
score of years to his two. It made all the differences manifest and undeniable.
Rimrunners cheated time and clocks and calendars, those universal tyrants: that
was what people thought, and why everyone envied them, and some resented them,
and a few hated them, despite the surface show of admiration. But the price of
those stolen years was high, and few could pay it. One rimrunner out of a
hundred did a second circuit. So far, only Vanderhorst had returned for a third
and a fourth.