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

"Uh huh. Anything else?"
Nobody answered.
"Well, that's that." Strac drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. "There's too much risk in searching the nearby stars. We'll have to make do with what we've got. Chanda, please order the Brain to set us down on the highest flat point in Earth's noon-equator region."
Chanda didn't move. Nobody moved.
"I knew it," Verd said, very quietly. His voice echoed in the greater quiet. The crew common room was like a museum exhibit. Everyone seemed afraid to move. Everyone but Jimm Farmer, who in careful silence was getting to his feet.
"Didn't you understand, Strac?" Verd paused and tried to make his voice persuasive. "The Brain put you in charge because you had more useful knowledge than the rest of us. You were supposed to find a new home for the human race."
They were all staring at Strac with varying degrees of horror. All but Jimm, who stood patiently waiting for the others to make up their minds.
"You were not supposed to give up and take us home to die!" Verd snapped. But Strac was ignoring him. Strac was glaring at them all in rage and contempt.
Parliss, normally Nordic-pale, was white as moonlight. "Strac, it's dead! Leave it! We can find another world--"
"You mewling litter of blind idiots."
Even Jimm Farmer looked shocked.
"Do you think I'd kill us all for a twinge of homesickness? Verd, you know better than that, even if nobody else does. They were on your back, twenty-seven adults and all their potential children, all waiting for you to tell them how to die. Then came the mutiny. Now you're free! They've all shifted to my back!"
His eyes left Verd's and ranged over his shocked, silent crew. "Idiots blindly taking orders from a damaged mechanical brain. Believing everything you're told. Lourdi!" he snapped. "What does 'one face' mean?"
Lourdi jumped. "It means the body doesn't rotate with respect to its primary."
"It doesn't mean the planet has only one face?"
"Wha-at?"
"The Earth has a back side to it."
"Sure!"
"What does it look like?"
"I don't know." Lourdi thought a moment. "The Brain knows. You remember you asked Chanda to make the Brain use the radar to check the back side. Then she couldn't get the Brain to show us the picture. We can't use the telescope because there's no light, not even infrared. It must be terribly cold. Colder than Pluto."
"You don't know," said Strac. "But I do. We're going down. Chanda?"
"Tell us about it," said Jimm Farmer.
"No," said Verd.
He had not known that he was going to speak. He had known only that they had given Strac the responsibility without the power to match it. But Strac felt the responsibility; he carried it in his bent shoulders and bleak expression, in his deep, painful breathing, in his previous attempts to pass the buck to someone else. Why would Strac want to land on Earth? Verd didn't know. But Strac must know what he was doing. Otherwise he couldn't have moved at all.
Someone had to back him up.
"No." Verd spoke with all the authority he could muster. "Chanda, take her down."
"Tell us about it," Jimm repeated. The authority backing his flat, menacing tone was his own titanic physical strength.
"No. Shut up, Jimm. Or we'll let you make all the decisions from now on."
Jimin Farmer thought it over, suddenly laughed and sat down. Chanda picked up her stylus and began tapping on the speaker.
***
The Hogan's Goat lay on her side, nearly in the center of a wide, ancient asteroid crater. There, marring the rounded spine with its long stinger, was the ragged, heat-stained hole that marked a meteor strike. There, along two-thirds of the length of her belly, was the gash a rock had made in the last seconds of the landing. And at the tail, forward of the braking spine, that static explosion of curved metal strips was where the photon drive had been torn free.
A small, fiercely bright Sun burned down from a black sky.
It had been a bad landing. Even at the start the Brain was a fraction of a second slow in adjusting ship's gravity, so that the floor had bucked queasily under them as they dropped. Then, when they were already falling toward the crater, Strac had suddenly added a new order. The photon drive had to be accessible after landing. Chanda had started tappingand the ship had flipped on its side.
The Hogan's Goat had never been built to land on its side. Many of the passengers sported bruises. Avran Zooman had broken an arm. Without boosterspice the bone would be slow to heal.
A week of grinding labor was nearly over.
Only servomachinery now moved on the crater floor. From Verd's viewpoint most of the activity seemed to center around a gigantic silver tube which was aimed like a cannon at a point ten degrees above the horizon. The drive tube had been towed up against the crater wall, and a mountain of piled, heat-fused earth now buried its lower end. Cables and fuel pipes joined it higher up.
"Hi! Is that you, Captain?"
Verd winced. "I'm on top of the crater wall," he said, because Strac couldn't locate him from the sound of his voice. The indeterminate voice had to be Strac. Only Strac would bellow into a suit radio. "And I'm not the captain."
Strac floated down beside him. "I thought I'd see the sights."
"Good. Have a seat."
"I find it strange to have to call you Verd," said the astrophysicist. "It used to be just 'Captain.' "
"Serves you right for staging a mutiny-- Captain."
"I always knew my thirst for power would get me in trouble."
They watched as a tractor-mounted robot disconnected a fuel pipe from the drive, then rolled back. A moment later a wash of smoky flame burst from the pipe. The flame changed color and intensity a dozen times within a few seconds, then died as abruptly as it had begun. The robot waited for the white heat to leave the pipe, then rolled forward to reconnect it.
Verd asked, "Why are you so calm all of a sudden?"
"My job's over," Strac said with a shrug in his voice. "Now it's in the lap of Kdapt."
"Aren't you taking an awful chance?"
"Oh? You've guessed what I'm trying to do?"
"I hope it wasn't a secret. There's only one thing you could be doing, with the photon drive all laid out and braced like that. You're trying to spin the Earth."
"Why?" Strac baited him.