"Bc27" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry & Pournelle)

Beowulf's Children
Chapter 27

GEOGRAPHIC

Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old,
Sweet joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while
Sweet joy befall thee.
-WILLIAM BLAKE, Infant Joy

The Minervas were the fusion-powered landing craft brought from Sol system. Once on the ground they had served as primary power plants until the mines had produced enough materials for the fabrication of the solar-collector material known as Begley cloth. One Minerva died in the Grendel Wars. The others were used to visit the ship that had brought the children of Earth to their new world: the Geographic.
Late in the morning, Cadmann skeetered in with Sylvia. "Mickey's up at the house with Mary Ann," he said quietly.
"How is she doing?"
Cadmann's face was dark. "Not well. Worse than I expected. It is as if something was just taken right out of her. Linda's death was a near final thing, and then the business with Toshiro--that was a last straw of some kind. I can't say that I don't understand it. I just regret it. Regret everything."
Zack nodded.
He helped Sylvia out of the skeeter.
Cadmann went to Carlos. "Hola." Carlos smiled at him lazily, stretched a little, and nodded his head. "A good day for hiking, eh?"
"A very good one."
The Minerva was a 160-foot long delta-winged aero-spaceplane. Its dock was the artificial lake northeast of the colony, but it could land on any body of water. The Minerva's power plants would dissociate lake water into hydrogen and oxygen to use as fuel. Together they had made almost four hundred round-trips to the Orion craft.
That couldn't last. All of the original equipment from Earth was aging fast. One day another Minerva would fail. When the last Minerva failed, as it must, the human race on Avalon would be grounded until they could build an industrial base capable of taking Mankind back to the stars. Depending on priorities, that might take a hundred years. Knowledge alone wasn't enough. Spacecraft require specialized equipment.
They strapped themselves into the worn seats. There had been fifty, but now there were only nine. The others had been removed: more cargo space and less weight.
Carlos watched his friend ease into the pilot seat. The position was more symbolic than real: Minerva was controlled by a computer. And that's the way it is, Carlos thought. We sit at the controls, but we don't run the colony anymore. I wonder if Cadmann feels that way. Probably not. Cadmann was a strange one. He was bothered, he was troubled, but as long as there was a definite purpose to his life, he moved with all of the old intention and force. It had grown harder over the years to find a purpose to animate him, to give him a sense of meaning and potential contribution, but he still felt needed.
Or had until the Robor incident. Now, there seemed no way to console him. The death of one of the children . . . There was no word for the sense of loss. And Carlos, for all of the years of knowing Cadmann, couldn't say that he understood the workings of his friend's mind.
"Cassandra. System check."
Cassandra slowed her processes down to give Carlos a system-by-system check of all of the component parts of the Minerva. She stopped in the middle to flash a schematic, saying, "I have identified a burn-through spot in the right rear attitude cluster. I would suggest repair during the next maintenance cycle."
"Is it safe for today?"
"Yes. Fractional chance of failure, and two backup systems."
"All right. Power up sequence. Destination, dock with Geographic."
"Two hundred and nine seconds to liftoff," Cassandra said. Lights flashed on the control board. "Ground tests complete. Engine ignition in one hundred and seventy seconds." They waited. Then pumps whined, and they felt the steady roar as the engines lit.
"Power-up complete," Cassandra announced. "All systems go."
"Take us up."
"Thirty-five seconds to liftoff," Cassandra said.
They waited again; then they felt the first motion. The Minerva slid across the water faster and faster, and suddenly they were aloft. The nose tilted up until it was almost vertical. Clouds broke across the nose; then the sky was baby blue, gradually darkening. The roar seemed to originate inside him, shaking and stirring him, giving him a wild and joyous sense of freedom unmatched by anything else in his world. He loved it.
His weight eased. A whisper of thrust continued: though the oxygen and hydrogen tanks were empty, the fusion plant remained. With that he could reach the planets. Once you're in orbit you're halfway to anywhere.
He glimpsed Geographic twinkling ahead.
"Docking sequence initiated," Cassandra said.
Carlos unlocked his chair and spun it sixty degrees around. Cadmann was resting with his eyes closed. Sylvia's hand rested softly in his. Zack was engrossed in a holo data-management module display, probably some inventory list that needed to be vetted for the hundredth time.
They needed someone like Zack. Thank God it didn't have to be Carlos Martinez! That, Carlos decided, would have been a genuine waste. But someone needed to put tomorrow on an even par with today.
He, Carlos, enjoyed the present far too much.

Geographic was nearly history's largest work of man (the Zuider Zee still held the record) and was certainly and by far the largest movable object. Though a mere skeleton of its former size and mass, it was still impressive as hell. Cadmann could remember the young man he had been, flying up from Buenos Aires to Geographic for the first time, one of a shuttle group of twelve. The first inspection of a genuine interstellar spacecraft was so different from the simulator sessions they had all suffered through.
It had been the culmination of a dream, a grand adventure at the end of a lifetime of adventures, something so beautiful, so rife with possibility . . .
It was too big. And it was going to take them someplace too far, and take entirely too long to do it--and they had worked to be there. If they had had regrets it was far too late to voice them by the time they were aboard.
"I was thinking . . ." Cadmann said. "Why did we come out here?"
"What are you talking about?"
"You know what I'm talking about. Not what we say to the children. Not the myths. Why are we really here?"
Zack glanced up from his figuring. "What do you mean?"