"Niven, Larry - Passerby" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

PASSERBY


It was noon of a hot blue day. The park was lively with raised voices and bright clothing, children and adults and the geriatrics generation, of which I have the honor to be a member. I had come early enough to claim a bench, and was old and feeble enough to hold it.
I had brought a sandwich lunch in a Baggy. I ate slowly, saving out an orange and a second sac of beer for later. The populace danced before me, never dreaming that I was watching.
The afternoon sun burned warm on my scalp. A lizardlike torpor stole over me, so that the sound of adult voices and children's screaming-for-the-hell-of-it dimmed and faded.
But I heard the footsteps. They jarred the earth.
I opened my eyes and saw the rammer.
He was six feet tall and massively built. He wore a scarf and a pair of blue balloon pants, not too far out of style, but they didn't match. What they exposed of his skin was loose on him, as if he had shrunk within it. Indeed, he looked like a giraffe wearing an elephant's skin.
He walked without springs. His feet slapped hard into the gravel with all his weight behind them. Small wonder I had heard him coming. By now everyone in sight was either looking at him, or turning to see what everyone was looking at. Except the children, who had already lost interest.
To me he was irresistible.
There are the casual peoplewatchers who watch their neighbors in restaurants or monorail stations when they have nothing else to do. They develop their own amateurish technique, and they don't know what to look for, and they usually get caught. But I'm not that kind of peoplewatcher.
There are the fanatics, the dedicated ones, who learn their technique in a closed-circuit 3V class. They hold lifetime subscriptions to Face In The Crowd and Eyes Of The City, the hobby magazines. They write letters to the editor telling how they spotted Secretary-General Haruman in a drug store and he looked unhappy.
That's me.
And here I was not twenty yards from a rammer, a man from the stars.
He had to be that. His taste in clothing was odd, and his carelessly draped skin was alien. His legs had not yet learned to cushion his weight against Earth's heavier gravity. He projected an indefinable combination of discomfort and self-consciousness and interest and surprise and pleasure, that silently shouted: Tourist!
His eyes, looking out from behind the ill-fitting mask of his face, were bright and blue and happy. Our staring rudeness was noticed, but did not affect his almost religious joy. Nor did his feet, though they must have hurt. His smile was dreamy and very strange. Lift the corners of a spaniel's mouth with your forefingers, and you'd see such a smile.
He drew in life from the sky and the grass and the voices and the growing things. I watched his face and tried to read it. Was he the priest of some new Earth-worshipping religion? No. Probably he was seeing Earth for the first time: tuning his bio-rhythms to Earth for the first time, feeling Earthweight settle over and into his bones, watching suns rise twenty-four hours apart, until his very genes told him he was home.
It made his day when he saw the boy.
The boy was around ten, a handsome child, naked and tanned all over. (When I was growing up, even the infants wore clothing in public.) I had not noticed him until now, and he in turn had not noticed the rammer. He knelt on the path that passed my bench, his back toward me. I could not see what he was doing; but he was very intent and serious about it.
By now most of the passerby had turned away, from disinterest or an overdose of good manners. I watched the rammer watching the boy. I watched through half-closed eyes, practicing my famous imitation of an old man asleep in the sun. The Heisenberg Principle implies that no peoplewatcher should allow himself to be caught at it.
The boy stooped suddenly, then rose with his hands cupped. Moving with exaggerated care, he turned from the gravel path and crossed the grass toward a dark old oak.
The rammer's eyes went big and round. All his pleasure gave way to horror, and then the horror drained away and left nothing. The star man's eyes turned up in his head, his slack face went even slacker, and his knees began to buckle.
Stiff as I am these days, I reached him. I slid an admittedly bony shoulder under his armpit before he could fall. All the mass of him came gratefully down on me.
I should have folded like an accordion. Somehow, I got the rammer to the bench before I had to let go of him. To an astonished matron I wheezed, "Get a doctor!"
She nodded briskly and waddled away. I turned back to the rammer. Sick eyes looked up at me from under straight black bangs. The rammer's face was oddly tanned: dark where the sun could reach, white as milk where folded skin cast shadows. His chest and arms were like that too. Where the skin was pale it had paled further with shock. "No need for doctor," he whispered. "Not sick. Something I saw."
"Sure. Put your head between your legs. It'll keep you from fainting." I opened my remaining beer sac.
"I will be all right in a moment," he said from between his knees. He spoke the tongue oddly, and his weakness slurred it further. "It was the shock of what I saw."
"Here?"
"Yes. No. Not completely. . ." He stopped to shift mental gears, and I handed him the beer. He looked at it as if wondering which end to suck on, found the nipple, raised the sac and half-drained it in one desperate draught.
"What was it you saw?" I asked.
He had to finish swallowing. "I saw an alien spacecraft. Without the spacecraft it would have meant nothing."
"What kind of ship? Smithpeople? Monks?" These are the only known spacegoing races, aside from ourselves. I'd never seen one of their ships; but they sometimes docked in the Lщshy worlds.
The rammer's eyes narrowed in his quilted face. "I see. You think I speak of some registered alien ship in a human spaceport." His voice was no longer slurred; he picked his words with apparent care. "I was halfway between the Horvendile and Koschei systems, shipwrecked at the edge of lightspeed, waiting to die. And I saw a golden giant walking among the stars."
"A humanoid? Not a ship?"
"I . . . thought it was a ship. I can't prove it."
"Mmm."
"Let me tell you. I was a year and a half out from Horvendile, bound for Koschei. It would have been my first trip home in thirty-one years. . .
Flying a ramship under sail is like flying a spiderweb.
Even with the web retracted, a ramship is a flimsy beast. Cargo holds, external cargo netting and hooks, pilot cabin and life support system, and the insystem fusion motor are all contained in a rigid pod just three hundred feet long. All else is balloons and webbing.
At takeoff the balloons are filled with hydrogen fuel for the insystem fusion motor. By the time the ship reaches ramscoop speed the fuel is half gone, replaced by low-pressure gas. The balloons are retained as meteor shielding.
The ramscoop web is superconducting wire, thin as spiderweb, tens of thousands of miles of it. Coiled for takeoff, it forms a roll no bigger than the main pod. Put a uniform negative charge on it and it spreads to form a hoop two hundred miles across. It ripples at first under the differentiating fields. .
Interstellar hydrogen, thin as nothing, enters the mouth of the ramscoop web. An atom to a cubic centimeter. Differentiating fields compress it along the axis, compress it until it undergoes fusion. It burns in a narrow blue flame, yellow-tinged at the edges. The electromagnetic fields in the fusion flame begin to support the ramscoop web. Mighty forces add, making web and flame and incoming hydrogen one interlocking whole.
A rigid pod, invisibly small, rides the flank of a wispy cylinder of webbing two hundred miles across. A tiny spider on an enormous web.
Time slows down, distances compress at the higher velocities. Hydrogen flows faster through the web; the ramscoop fields increase in power, the web becomes more rigid, more stable.
A ship should not need supervision as it approaches the midpoint turnover.
"I was halfway to Koschei," said the rammer, "carrying the usual cargo: genetically altered seeds, machine prototypes, spices, and three corpsicles: passengers frozen for storage. We carry anything that cannot be sent by message laser.
"I still don't know what went wrong. I was asleep. I had been asleep for months, with a current pulsing through my brain. Perhaps a piece of meteoric iron entered the ramscoop. Perhaps the hydrogen grew thin for an hour, then thickened too fast. Perhaps we entered a sharply bounded OH + region. In any case, something twisted the ramscoop field, and the web collapsed.