"Larry Niven - Footfall" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

That thought made her frown. Ed went all gooey over her pregnancy, but it turned him off! Maybe I'll lose interest in a month or so. I sure hope so, the way he acts.
Linda poured more coffee. The telephone rang, startling her so that she dropped the cup. It was Corningware and didn't break, but it clattered loudly on the floor, spilling coffee everywhere.
"Hello?"
"Linda?"
"Yes?"
"By golly, it is you! It's Roger."
"Oh. How are you, Roger?"
"Great. Glad you haven't forgotten me."
"No, I haven't forgotten." You don't forget your first, she thought. First love, first sex experience, first--a lot of firsts with Roger, back in high school and just after. And what should I say? That he hasn't called in a long time, but that's all right because I didn't want him to? "Roger, how did you get our number?"
"We reporters have our ways. Hey, I'd like to see you. What about a really unusual experience?"
She giggled. "Roger, I'm a married woman."
"Sure. Happily?"
"Yes, of course!"
"Good. Good for you and Edmund, anyway. What I have in mind is in Edmund's line. JPL. The Saturn encounter. Voyager is out there getting pictures nobody understands, and we can see them firsthand." He paused a moment. "It's this way. I'm here in Los Angeles covering the Saturn story. Not exactly Pulitzer Prize material, but I took the assignment to get away from Washington for a while. So I'm out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where the pictures come in. We get briefings from the scientists, and there's science-fiction writers, and it's a hell of a show. Let me pick you up on my way out, you're almost on the way. I'll have you home by dinnertime, and I won't try to seduce you."
And Ed was gone for a week. "It's tempting. It really is, but I can't."
"Sure you can."
"Roger, my sister is staying here!"
"So what? I'll have you home before dinner."
Linda thought about that. Jenny was off somewhere for the day. Saturn pictures. Reporters. It might be fun. "You said science fiction writers. Is Nat Reynolds there?"
"Yeah, I think so. Just a second, there's a list -- yeah, he's there. Know him?"
"No, but Edmund likes his books. I bought one for his birthday. Think I could get it autographed?"
"An astronaut's wife? Hell, those sci-fi types will turn flips to meet you."
Nat Reynolds was hung over, and it was far too early to be up. It was a miracle he'd made it up the arroyo to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory parking lot and got the Porsche into the tiny slot the JPL guard had showed him.
There were cars parked for half a mile along the road leading to where JPL nestled in what had once been a lonely arroyo. The sweet immediately outside the press center was nearly blocked by TV vans, and a thick web of cables spanned the sidewalk to vanish through open loading doors. The press corps had turned out in force, bringing almost as many cameras and crews as they'd send to the site of a bank robbery in progress.
The von Karman Auditorium was a madhouse. Nearly every square foot of floor space was covered by someone: scientist, public relations, press corps, most holding coffee cups or carrying bulky objects.
The press corps was divided. There were the working press and there were the science-fiction writers, and no doubt about who was who. The press was there to work. Some had fun, but all had deadlines. The SF types were there to gawk, and be part of the scene, and absorb the atmosphere, and maybe someday it would get into a story and maybe not. Their world was being created and they were here to see it happen.
This is Saturn!
Huge TV screens showed pictures as they came in from the Voyager. Every few minutes a picture changed. A close view of the planet, black-and-white streamlines and whorls. Rings, hundreds of them, like a close-up of a phonograph record. Saturn again, in color, with his rings in wide angle. Sections of the rings in closeup. Shots of moons. All just as it came in, so that the press saw it as soon as the scientists.
At the Jupiter passings the pictures had come in faster, in vivid swirls and endless storms, God making merry with an airbrush, and four moons that turned out to be worlds in their own right. But to balance that they'd soon see Titan, which was known to have an atmosphere. Sagan and the other scientists weren't saying they hoped to find life on Titan -- but they were certainly interested in the giant moon, which had so far been disappointingly featureless.
The screens shifted, and the babble in the room fell off for a moment. A moon like a giant eyeball: one tremendous crater of the proportions of an iris, with a central peak for the pupil. Anything bigger, Nat thought, would have shattered the whole moon. He heard a female voice say, "Well, we've located the Death Star," and he grinned without turning around. What do the newspeople think of us? He could picture himself: the idiot grin, mouth slightly open, drifting down the line of screens without looking where he was going, tripping over cables.
Nat couldn't make himself care. A screen changed to show something like a dry riverbed or three twined plumes of smoke or ... F-ring, the printout said. Nat said, "What the hell ..."
"You'd know if you'd been here last night."
"I've got to get some sleep." Nat didn't need to look around. He'd written two books with Wade Curtis; he expected to recognize that voice in Hell, when they planned their escape. Wade Curtis talked like he had an amplifier in his throat, turned high. Partly that was his military training, partly the deafness he'd earned as an artillery officer.
He also had a tendency to lecture. "F-ring," he said. "You know, like A, B, C, rings, only they're named in order of discovery, not distance from the planet, so the system's all screwed up. The F-ring is the one just outside the big body of rings. It's thin. Nobody ever saw it until the space probes went out there, and Pioneer didn't get much of a picture even then."
Nat held up his hand. I know, I know, the gesture said. Curtis shrugged and was quiet.
But the F-ring didn't look normal at all. It showed as three knotted streamers of gas or dust or God knows what all braided together. "Braided," Nat said. "What does that?"
"None of the astronomers wanted to say."
"Okay, I can see why. Catch me in a mistake, I shrug it off. A scientist, he's betting his career."
"Yeah. Well, I know of no law of physics that would permit that!"
Nat didn't either. He said, "What's the matter, haven't you ever seen three earthworms in love?" and accepted Wade's appreciative chuckle as his due. "I'd be afraid to write about it. Someone would have it explained before I could get the story into print."
The press conference was ready to start. The JPL camera crew unlimbered its gear to broadcast the press conference all over the laboratory grounds, and one of the public relations ladies went around turning off the screens in the conference mom.
"Hmm. Interesting stuff still coming in," Curtis said. "And there aren't any seats. I had a couple but I gave them to the Washington Post. Front-row seats, too."
"Too bad," Nat said. "What the hell, let's watch the conference from the reception area. Jilly's out there already."
On the morning of November 12. 1980, the pressroom at Jet Propulsion Laboratories was a tangled maze of video equipment and moving elbows. Roger and Linda had come early, but not early enough to get seats. A science-fiction writer in a bush jacket gave up his, two right in the front row.
"Sure it's all right?" Roger asked.
The sci-fi man shrugged. "You need 'em more than I do. Tell Congress the space program's important, that's all I ask."
Roger thanked the man and sat down. Linda Gillespie was trapped near the life-size spacecraft model, fending off still another reporter who was trying to interview her: what had it been like, marooned on Earth while her husband was aboard Skylab?
She looked great. He hadn't seen her since -- since when? Only twice since she'd married Edmund. And of course he'd been at her wedding. Linda's mother had cried. Damn near cried myself, Roger thought. How did I let her get out of circulation? But I wasn't ready to marry her myself. Maybe I should have...
The trouble was, he wasn't getting any story he could understand. People were excited, but they didn't say why. The regular science press people weren't telling. They all knew each other, and they resented outsiders at big events like this.
Roger doodled, looking up when anyone called a greeting, hoping nobody would want his attention. He hadn't asked for this assignment.