"Larry Niven - The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

"I wish I could help."
"You always help." I glanced at the clock. "Your coffee break's about over."
"Slave driver." Julie took my earlobe between thumb and forefinger. "Do him proud," she said, and went back to her soundproof room.
She always helps. She doesn't even have to speak. Just knowing that Julie has read my thoughts, that someone understands . .
that's enough.
All alone at three in the afternoon, I started my ceremonial drunk.
The ceremonial drunk is a young custom, not yet tied down by formality. There is no set duration. No specific toasts must be given. Those who participate must be close friends of the deceased, but there is no set number of participants.
I started at the Luau, a place of cool blue light and running water. Outside it was fifteen-thirty in the afternoon, but inside it was evening in the Hawaiian Islands of centuries ago. Already the place was half full. I picked a corner table with considerable elbow room and dialed for a Luau Grog. It came, cold, brown and alcoholic, its straw tucked into a cone of ice.
There had been three of us at Cubes Forsythe's ceremonial drunk, one black Ceres night four years ago. A sorry group we were, too; Owen and me and the widow of our third crewman. Gwen Forsythe blamed us for her husband's death. I was just out of the hospital with a right arm that ended at the shoulder, and I blamed Cubes and Owen and myself, all at once. Even Owen had turned dour and introspective. We couldn't have picked a worse trio, or a worse night for it if we'd tried.
But custom called, and we were there. Then as now, I found myself probing my own personality for the wound that was a missing crewman, a missing friend. Introspecting.
Gilbert Hamilton. Born of flatlander parents, in April, 2093, in Topeka, Kansas. Born with two arms and no sign of wild talents.
Flatlander: a Belter term referring to Earthmen, and particularly to Earthmen who had never seen space. I'm not sure my parents ever looked at the stars. They managed the third largest farm in Kansas, ten square miles of arable land between two wide strips of city paralleling two strips of turnpike. We were city people, like all flatlanders, but when the crowds got to be too much for my brothers and me, we had vast stretches of land to be alone in. Ten square miles of playground, with nothing to hamper us but the crops and automachinery.
We looked at the stars, my brothers and I. You couldn't see stars from the city; the lights hide them. Even in the fields you couldn't see them around the lighted horizon. But straight overhead, they were there: black sky scattered with bright dots, and sometimes a flat white moon.
At twenty I gave up my UN citizenship to become a Belter. I
wanted stars, and the Belt government holds title to most of the solar system. There are fabulous riches in the rocks, riches belonging to a scattered civilization of a few hundred thousand Belters; and I wanted my share .of that, too.
It wasn't easy. I wouldn't be eligible for a singleship license for ten years. Meanwhile I would be working for others and learning to avoid mistakes before they killed me. Half the flatlanders who join the Belt die in space before they can earn their licenses.
I mined tin on Mercury and exotic chemicals from Jupiter's atmosphere. I hauled ice from Saturn's rings and quick-silver from Europa. One year our pilot made a mistake pulling up to a new rock, and we damn near had to walk home. Cubes Forsythe was with us then. He managed to fix the com laser and aim it at Icarus to bring us help. Another time the mechanic who did the maintenance job on our ship forgot to replace an absorber, and we all got roaring drunk on the alcohol that built up in our breathingair. The three of us caught the mechanic six months later. I hear he lived.
Most of the time I was part of a three-man crew. The members changed constantly. When Owen Jennison joined us he replaced a man who had finally earned his singleship license and couldn't wait to start hunting rocks on his own. He was too eager. I learned later that he'd made one round trip and half of another.
Owen was my age, but more experienced, a Belter born and bred. His blue eyes and blond cockatoo's crest were startling against the dark of his Belter tan, the tan that ended so abruptly where his neck ring cut off the space-intense sunlight his helmet let through. He was permanently chubby, but in free fall it was as if he'd been born with wings. I took to copying his way of moving, much to Cubes' amusement.
I didn't make my own mistake until I was twenty-six.
We were using bombs to put a rock in a new orbit. A contract job. The technique is older than fusion drives, as old as early Belt colonization, and it's still cheaper and faster than using a ship's drive to tow the rock. You use industrial fusion bombs small and clean, and you get them so that each explosion deepens the crater to channel the force of later blasts.
We'd set four blasts already, four white fireballs that swelled and faded as they rose. When the fifth blast went off we were hovering nearby on the other side of the rock.
The fifth blast shattered the rock.
Cubes had set the bomb. My own mistake was a shared one, because any of the three of us should have had the sense to take off right then. Instead, we watched, cursing, as valuable oxygenbearing rock became near-valueless shards. We watched the shards spread slowly into a cloud . . . and while we watched, one fastmoving shard reached us. Moving too slowly to vaporize when it hit, it nonetheless sheered through a triple crystal-iron hull, slashed through my upper arm, and pinned Cubes Forsythe to a wall by his own heart.

A couple of nudists came in. They stood blinking among the booths while their eyes adjusted to the blue twilight, then converged with glad cries on the group two tables over. I watched and listened with an eye and an ear, thinking how different flatlander nudists were from Belter nudists. These all looked alike. They all had muscles, they had no interesting scars, they carried their credit cards in identical shoulder pouches, and they all shaved the same areas.
We always went nudist in the big bases. Most people did. It was a natural reaction to the pressure suits we wore day and night while out in the rocks. Get him into a short-sleeve environment, and your normal Belter sneers at a shirt. But it's only for comfort. Give him a good reason, and your Belter will don shirt and pants as quickly as the next guy.
But not Owen. After he got that meteor scar, I never saw him wear a shirt. Not just in the Ceres domes but anywhere there was air to breath. He just had to show that scar.
A cool blue mood settled on me, and I remembered. .
Owen Jennison lounging on a corner of my hospital bed, telling me of the trip back. I could not remember anything after that rock sheered through my arm.
I should have bled to death in seconds. Owen hadn't given me the chance. The wound was ragged; Owen had sliced it clean to the shoulder with one swipe of a corn laser. Then he'd tied a length of fiberglass curtain over the flat surface and knotted it tight under my remaining armpit. He told me about putting me under two atmospheres of pure oxygen as a substitute for replacing the blood I'd lost. He told me how he'd reset the fusion drive for four gees
to get me back in time. By rights we should have gone up in a cloud of starfire and glory.
"So there goes my reputation. The whole Belt knows how I rewired our drive. A lot of 'em figure if I'm stupid enough to risk my own life like that, I'd risk theirs too."
"So you're not safe to travel with."
"Just so. They're starting to call me Four Gee Jennison."
"You think you've got problems? I can just see how it'll be when I get back to this bed. 'You do something stupid, Gil?' The hell of it is, it was stupid."
"So lie a little."
"Uh huh. Can we sell the ship?"
"Nope. Gwen inherited a third interest in it from Cubes. She won't sell."
"Then we're effectively broke."
"Except for the ship. We need another crewman."
"Correction. You need two crewmen. Unless you want to fly with a one-armed man. I can't afford a transplant."
Owen hadn't tried to offer me a loan. That would have been insuiting, even if he'd had the money. "What's wrong with a prosthetic?"
"An iron arm? Sorry, no."
Owen had looked at me strangely, but all he'd said was, "Well, we'll wait a bit. Maybe you'll change your mind."
He hadn't pressured me. Not then, and not later, after I'd left the hospital and taken an apartment while I waited to get used to a missing arm. If he thought I would eventually settle for a prosthetic, he was mistaken.
Why? It's not a question I can answer. Others obviously feel differently; there are millions of people walking around with metal and plastic and silicone parts. Part man, part machine, and how do they themselves know which is the real person?
I'd rather be dead than part metal. Call it a quirk. Call it, even, the same quirk that makes my skin crawl when I find a place like Monica Apartments. A human being should be all human. He should have habits and possessions peculiarly his own, he should not try to look like or to behave like anyone but himself.
So there I was, Gil the Arm, learning to eat with my left hand.
An amputee never entirely loses what he's lost. My missing