"Niven, Larry - A World Out Of Time - v1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

The subject was an unpleasant one. Corbell avoided it from then on. But he could not avoid talking to the checker. Pierce was the only man in the world he could talk to. On the days Pierce failed to show up he felt angry, frustrated.

Once he asked about gravitational point sources. "My time didn't know about those."

"Yes, it did. Neutron stars and black holes. You had a number of pulsars located by 1970, and the mathematics to describe how a pulsar decays. The thing to watch for is a decayed pulsar directly in your path. Don't worry about black holes. There are none near your course."

"Okay. . ."

Pierce regarded him in some amusement. "You really don't know much about your own time, do you?"

"Come on, I was an architect. What would I know about astrophysics? We didn't have your learning techniques." Which reminded him of something. "Pierce, you said you learned English with RNA injections. Where does the RNA come from?"

Pierce smiled and walked away.

He had little time to remember. For that he was almost grateful. But very occasionally, lying wakeful in his bunk, listening to the shshsh of a thousand people breathing and the different sounds from the loving bunks, he would remember. . . someone. It didn't matter who.

At first it had been Mirabelle, always Mirabelle. Mirabelle at the tiller as they sailed out of San Pedro Harbor: tanned, square face, laughing mouth, extravagantly large dark glasses. Mirabelle, older and marked by months of strain, saying good-bye at his. . . funeral. Mirabelle on their honeymoon. In twenty-two years they had grown together like two touching limbs of a tree.

But now he thought of her, when he thought of her, as two hundred years dead.

And his niece was dead, though he and Mirabelle had barely made it to her confirmation; the pains had been getting bad then. And his daughter Ann. And all three of his grandchildren: just infants they had been! It didn't matter who it was that floated up into his mind. Everyone was dead. Everyone but him.

Corbell did not want to die. He was disgustingly healthy and twenty years younger than he had been at death. He found his rammer education continually fascinating. If only they would stop treating him like property.

Corbell had been in the army, but that was twenty years ago. Make that two hundred and forty. He had learned to take orders, but never to like it. What had galled him then was the basic assumption of his inferiority. But no army officer in Corbell's experience had believed in Corbell's inferiority as completely as did Pierce and Pierce's guards.

The checker never repeated a command, never seemed even to consider that Corbell might refuse. If Corbell refused, even once, he knew what would happen. Pierce knew that he knew. The atmosphere better fitted a death camp than an army.

They must think I'm a zombie.

Corbell was careful not to pursue the thought. He was a corpse

brought back to life-but not all the way. What did they do with the skeleton? Cremate it?

The life was not pleasant. His last-class citizenship was galling. There was nobody to talk to-nobody but Pierce, whom he was learning to hate. He was hungry much of the time. The single daily meal filled his belly, but it would not stay full. No wonder he had wakened so lean.

More and more he lived in the teaching chair. In the teaching chair he was a rammer. His impotence was changed to omnipotence. Starman! Riding the fire that feeds the suns, scooping fuel from interstellar space itself, spreading electromagnetic fields like wings hundreds of miles out.

Two weeks after the State had wakened him from the dead, Corbell was given his course.

He relaxed in a chair that was not quite a contour couch. RNA solution dripped into him. He no longer noticed the needle. The teaching screen held a map of his course, in green lines in three-space. Corbell had stopped wondering how the three-dimensional effect was achieved.

The scale was shrinking as he watched.

Two tiny blobs, and a glowing ball surrounded by a faintly glowing corona. This part of the course he already knew. A linear accelerator would launch him from the Moon, boost him to Bussard ramjet speeds and hurl him at the sun. Solar gravity would increase his speed while his electromagnetic fields caught and burned the solar wind itself. Then out, still accelerating.

In the teaching screen the scale shrank horrendously. The distances between stars were awesome, terrifying. Van Maanan's Star was twelve light-years away.

He would begin deceleration a bit past the midpoint. The matching would be tricky. He must slow enough to release the biological package probe-but not enough to drop him below ram speeds. In addition he must use the mass of Van Maanan's Star for a course change. There was no room for error here.