"Janet & Chris Morris - Threshold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morris Janet E)

THRESHOLD
Janet and Chris Morris


Copyright ┬й Paradise Productions, 1990
ISBN: 0-451-45084-1
e-book ver. 1.0

This novel is dedicated to Herbert L. OrtтАФmentor, business manager, spiritual guideтАФwith love and respect:
Without your wisdom, kindness, and unceasing care, Herb, life would not be half so sweet.



CHAPTER 1
Deja Vu
Past a sprinkle of asteroids in the foreground of his synthetic-aperture lidar screen, beyond a red crescent that ought to b
Mars, was the blue-green dot of Earth.
Or so the pilot's astronics were indicating. Captain Joseph South, U.S. Space Command, had learned to distrust his artific
intelligent "expert" astrogation system on this bad-luck test flight. Nothing had gone as planned during the maiden interstella
spongejump of the X-99A testbed he was piloting, beyond the mission beingтАФso farтАФsurvivable.
But the X-99A had never outright lied to him. And lidar returns, any test pilot knew, were as trustworthy as radar return
South shook his helmeted head and rubbed his eyes under his raised visor. Better rephrase that, since radar and lidar could
you if you let them, and South was fresh from a jump through a spongelike space whose prolonged effects on human being
were part of what this test flight was testing.
The laser-driven imaging system could only show him what was out there to bounce light back.
So something like Earth was out there, even if the expert system was telling him that the micro-match didn't fit any temp
of the home solar system for the next five hundred years.
The AI-expert had been giving South enough trouble on this flight that he'd promised himself, when he got home, to pull i
of the X-99A STARBIRD so that he could take it up into the hills around Vandenberg and shoot it with Grandpa's six-gun.
Since it was too soon to put a lead slug through its charge-coupled brain, and he didn't like the readout below his lidar scr
South did what any red-blooded American test pilot would do in his situation: he whacked the offending meter, hard, with t
of his gloved hand.
The digital readout didn't even shiver. The date on the meter didn't change. The heads-up display reflecting it on STARB
windscreen didn't, either.
With a sigh, South slapped down his helmet's visor and pulled up all the relevant data through his suit's system, reading th
results of his Extravehicular Mobility Unit's redundant command and control display. The projections on the inside of his vi
showed him the same pictures and numbers that the master system had, only now he had to scroll and tap and voice-comm
his way through a full astro error search, because the suit's helmet could show him only four data pulls at a time and still gi
him a vision window in the center of his visor.
And South needed to keep an eye on his flight deckтАФ especially on the lidar screenтАФto see if anything changed while h
doing the equivalent of telling STARBIRD's AI that it had its silicon head wedged up its outputs.
But nothing changed. The planets on his lidar were still telling STARBIRD they were five hundred years decayed in their
from project ETA, this system. South pulled up a standard return template and superimposed it on the realtime lidar return.
didn't look that damned different to him. So maybe the AI itself was out of kilter.
He hoped not. STARBIRD was going to be a real handful to dock if he had to do it from his suit's astronicsтАФor manually
Still, he had to do it. "Give me the quickest plot to docking, Birdy. Send it with ETA, our call signs, to Station." He flipped
monitoring mode. STARBIRD's AI would run the message by him before it burst it by laser carrier toward the U.S. Space
Station in orbit around the earth.
The AI's voice once gave him the creeps, but now he was used to it. The mission had eaten fourteen months out of Joe
South's life. Even with STARBIRD's capabilities, it would eat four more before he docked. There were better than twenty