"Niven, Larry - One Face" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

One Face

An alarm rang: a rising, falling crescendo, a mechanical shriek of panic. The baritone voice of the ship's Brain blared, "Strac Astrophysics is not in his cabin! Strac Astrophysics, report to your cabin immediatelyl The Hogan's Goat will Jump in sixty seconds."
Verd sat bolt upright, then forced himself to lie down again. The Hogan's Goat had not lost a passenger through carelessness in all the nearly two centuries of Verd's captaincy. Passengers were supposed to be careless. If Strac didn't reach his room Verd would have to postpone Jump to save his life: a serious breach of custom.
Above the green coffin which was his Jump couch the Brain said, "Strac Astrophysics is in his cabin and protected."
Verd relaxed.
"Five," said the Brain. "Four. Three..."
In various parts of the ship, twenty-eight bodies jerked like springs released "Oof," came a complaint from the Jump couch next to Verd's. "That felt strange. Damn strange."
"Um," said Verd.
Lourdi Coursefinder tumbled out of her Jump couch. She was a blend of many subdivisions of man, bearing the delicate, willowy beauty born of low-gravity worlds. She was Verd's wife, and an experienced traveler. Now she looked puzzled and disturbed.
"Jump never felt like that. What do you suppose--"
Verd grunted as he climbed out. He was a few pounds overweight. His face was beefy, smooth and unlined, fashionably hairless. So was his scalp, except for a narrow strip of black brush which ran straight up from between his brow ridges and continued across his scalp and downward until it faded out near the small of his back. Most of the hair had been surgically implanted. Neither wrinkled skin nor width of hair strip could number a man's years, and superficially Verd might have been anywhere from twenty to four hundred years old. It was in his economy of movement that his age showed. He did things the easy way, the fast way. He never needed more than seconds to find it, and he always took that time. The centuries had taught him well.
"I don't know," he said. "Let's find out what it was. Brain!" he snapped at a wall speaker.
The silence stretched like a nerve.
"Brain?"
***
One wall arced over to become the ceiling, another jogged inward to leave room for a piece of the total conversion drive, a third was all controls and indicators for the ship's Brain. This was the crew common room. It was big and comfortable, a good place to relax, and no crewman minded its odd shape. Flat ceilings were for passengers.
Verd Spacercaptain, Lourdi Coursefinder, and Parliss Lifesystems sat along one wall, watching the fourth member of the crew.
Chanda Metalminds was a tall, plain woman whose major beauty was her wavy black hair. A strip three inches wide down the center of her scalp had been allowed to grow until it hung to the region of her coccyx. Satin black and satin smooth, it gleamed and rippled as she moved. She stood before the biggest of the Brain screens, which now showed a diagram of the Hogan's Goat, and she used her finger as a pointer.
"The rock hit here." Chanda's finger rested almost halfway back along the spinal maze of lines and little black squares which represented the Jumper section. The Hogan's Goat was a sculptured torpedo, and the Jumper machinery was its rounded nose and its thick spine and its trailing wasplike sting. You could see it in the diagram. The rest of the Goat had been designed to fit the Jumper. And the Jumper was cut by a slanting line, bright red, next to Chanda's fingertip.
"It was a chunk of dirty ice, a typical piece of comet head,", said Chanda. "The meteor gun never had a chance at it. It was too close for that when we came out of overspace. Impact turned the intruder to plasma in the Jumper. The plasma cone knocked some secondary bits of metal loose, and they penetrated here. That rained droplets of high-speed molten metal all through the ship's Brain."
Parliss whistled. He was tall, ash blond, and very young. "That'll soften her up," he murmured irreverently. He winced under Chanda's glare and added, "Sorry."
Chanda, held the glare a moment before she continued. "There's no chance of repairing the Brain ourselves. There are too many points of injury, and most of them too small to find. Fortunately the Brain can still solve problems and obey orders. Our worst problem seems to be this motor aphasia. The Brain can't speak, not in any language. I've circumvented that by instructing the Brain to use Winsel code. Since I don't know the extent of the damage precisely, I recommend we land the passengers by tug instead of trying to land the Goat."
Verd cringed at the thought of what the tug captains would say. "Is that necessary?"
"Yes, Verd. I don't even know how long the Brain will answer to Winsel code. It was one of the first things I tried. I didn't really expect it to work, and I doubt it would on a human patient."
"Thanks, Chanda." Verd stood up and the Brain surgeon sat down. "All I have to say, group, is that we're going to take a bad loss this trip. The Brain is sure to need expensive repairs, and the Jumper will have to be almost completely torn out. It gave one awful discharge when the meteor hit, and a lot of parts are fused. --Lourdi, what's wrong? We can afford it."
Lourdi's face was bloodless. Her delicate surgeon's fingers strangled the arms of her chair.
"Come on," Verd said gently. What could have driven her into such a panic? "We land on Earth and take a vacation while the orbital repair companies do the worrying. What's wrong with that?"
Lourdi gave her head a spastic shake. "We can't do
that. Oh, Eye of Kdapt, I didn't dare believe it. Verd,
we've got to fix the Jumper out here."
"Not a chance. But--"
"Then we've got trouble," Lourdi had calmed a little, but it was the calm of defeat.
"I couldn't ask the Brain to do it, so I used the telescope myself. That's not Sol."
The others looked at her.
"It's not the Sun. It's a greenish-white dwarf, a dead I
star. I couldn't find the Sun."
***
Once it had its orders, the Brain was much faster with the telescope than Lourdi. It confirmed her description of the star which was where Sol should have been, and added that it was no star in the Brain's catalogue. Furthermore the Brain could not recognize the volume of space around it. It was still scanning stars, hoping to find its bearings.
"But the rock hit after we came out of overspace. After!" Verd said between his teeth. "How could we have gone anywhere else?" Nobody was listening.
They sat in the crew common room drinking droobleberry juice and vodka.
"We'll have to tell the passengers something," said Chanda. Nobody answered, though she was dead right. Interstellar law gave any citizen free access to a computer. In space the appropriate computer was a ship's Brain. By now the passengers must have discovered that the Brain was incommunicado.
Lourdi stopped using her glass to make rings on the tabletop. "Chanda, will you translate for me?"
Chanda looked up. "Of course."
"Ask the Brain to find the planet in this system which most resembles Saturn."
"Saturn?" Chanda's homely face lost its hopeful expression. Nonetheless she began tapping on the rim of a Brain speaker with the end of a stylus, tapping in therhythms of Winsel code.
Almost immediately a line of short and long white dashes began moving left to right across the top of the Brain screen. The screen itself went white, cleared, showed what looked like a picture of Saturn. But the ring showed too many gaps, too well defined. Chanda said, "Fifth major planet from primary. Six moons. Period: 29.46 years. Distance from Sun: 9.45 A.U. Diameter: 72,018 miles. Type: gas giant. So?"
Lourdi nodded. Verd and Parliss were watching her intently. "Ask it to show us the second and third planets."
The second planet was in its quarter phase. The Brain screen showed it looking like a large moon, but less badly pocked, and with a major difference: the intensely bright area across the middle. Chanda translated the marching dots: "Distance: 1.18 A.U. Period: 401.4. Diameter: 7918 miles. No moons. No air."
The third planet-- "That's Mars," said Lourdi.