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

Corbett spent twenty minutes finding the moon base with his signal laser. The beam was too narrow to permit sloppy handling.

When he had it adjusted he said, "This is Corbett for himself, Corbett for himself. I'm fine. How are you?"

He spent more time at the computer. One thing had been bothering him: the return. He planned to be away longer than the State would have expected. Suppose there was nobody on the moon when he returned?

It was a problem, he found. If he could reach the moon on his remaining fuel (no emergencies, remember), he could reach the Earth's atmosphere. The ship was durable; it would stand a meteoric re-entry. But his attitude jets would not land him, properly speaking.

Unless he could cut away part of the ship. The ram field generators would no longer be needed ... Well, he would work it out somehow. Plenty of time. Plenty of time.

The answer took nine hours. "Peerssa for the State. Corbett, we don't understand. You are way off course. Your first target was to be Van Maanan's Star. Instead you seem to be curving around toward Sagittarius. There is no known Earthlike planet in that direction. What the bleep do you think you're doing? Repeating. Peerssa for the State, Peerssa-"

Corbett tried to switch it off. The teaching chair hadn't told him about an off switch. He managed to disconnect a wire. Somewhat later, he located the lunar base with his signal laser and began transmission.

"This is Corbett for himself, Corbett for himself. I'm getting sick and tired of having to find you every damn time I want to say something. So I'll give you this all at once.

"I'm not going to any of the stars on your list.

"It's occurred to me that the relativity equations work better for me the faster I go. If I stop every fifteen light-years to launch a probe, the way you want me to, I could spend two hundred years at it and never get anywhere. Whereas if I just aim the ship in one direction and keep it going, I can build up a ferocious Tau factor.

"It works out that I can reach the galactic hub in twenty-one years, ship's time, if I hold myself down to one gravity acceleration. And, Pierce, I just can't resist the idea. You were the one who called me a born tourist, remember? Well, the stars in the galactic hub aren't like the stars in the arms. And they're packed a quarter to a half light-year apart, according to your own theories. It must be passing strange in there.

"So, I'll go exploring on my own. Maybe I'll find some of your reducing-atmosphere planets and drop the probes there. Maybe I won't. I'll see you in about seventy thousand years, your time. By then your precious State may have withered away, or you'll have colonies on the seeded planets and some of them may have broken loose from you. I'll join one of them. Or-"

Corbett thought it through, rubbing the straight, sharp line of his nose. "I'll have to check it out on the computer," he said. "But if I don't like any of your worlds when I get back, there are always the Clouds of Magellan. I'll bet they aren't more than twenty-five years away, ship's time."

From "A Hole In Space" by Larry Niven, published by Ballantine Books, New York, New York, 1974