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

the millennium, a time when half the world looked to the turn of the century as
an end and the other half saw it as a beginning. Those who proclaimed Armageddon
felt that their prophecy was fulfilled, albeit belatedly, when in 2006 a giant
meteorite plunged into the Indian Ocean.

For Vanderhorst, the calamity meant deliverance. Within months the Perimeter
Orbiting Patrol had been organized. Staffed and supported by most of the nations
of the world, its mission was to serve as first line of defense: to detect and
destroy any incoming object that threatened Earth or the lunar colonies. Its
budget was unlimited.

Volunteers were many; the qualified were very few. For that fortunate handful,
POP offered the honor of being a "defender of the farthest frontier," as its
promoters said. It also promised an extended lifespan and a chance to amass
enormous wealth. To Vanderhorst, it afforded escape from the daily round of
hardship and indignity compounded by growing hatred for the generations that had
left their children a drained and dirty world to live on. He knew that
regeneration would come, but no one then alive could hope to see it -- except by
cheating time.

POP offered the cheater. In return, it required two years of one's life, nearly
twenty of objective time, spent farther out in space than any human had ever
ventured; alone, encapsulated, beyond all hope of help from Earth, beyond all
contact with one's native world.

Vanderhorst considered it a fair exchange. An only child, orphaned while young,
instinctively mistrustful of groups and more independent than was socially
permissible, he seemed the ideal rimrunner: a loner by nature and by choice. In
2008, he became the sixth to lift off.

He returned to Earth in 2028 with vague memories of smothering blackness; of
hideous nightmares, of helplessness crushing him like a weight. Nothing was
clear in his memory but the sensation of being utterly alone. He vowed never to
go up again.

After three months downside, he reconsidered his vow. Four more trips and he
could retire, an immensely rich man still physically in his thirties, though
Earth calculations would make him more than a century and a quarter old. He
debated, weighed the alternatives, changed his mind half a dozen times, and then
went up again.

"Are you listening, Van?" Jemma's voice broke into his reverie.

"It sounds as if I can be arrested for doing anything that looks like I might
enjoy it."
"No one's arrested anymore, Van. Offenders are offered social assistance."

"Offered? Then that means I can turn it down, doesn't it?" They looked at him,
faces bland as wax. "All right, forget that remark. Just run a summary of
behavior expectations into my cram. It's simpler that way," he said, yawning.