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

"Starship pilot."

Corbett studied the checker's face. "You're kidding."

"No. Learn now." The checker turned on Corbett's screen and went away.

II

A rammer was the pilot of a starship.

The starships were Bussard ramjets. They caught interstellar hydrogen in immaterial nets of electromagnetic force, guided and compressed and burned the hydrogen for thrust. Potentially there was no limit at all on their speed. They were enormously powerful, enormously complex, enormously expensive.

Corbett found it incredible that the State would trust so much value, such devastating power and mass to one man. To a man two centuries dead! Why, Corbett was an architect, not an astronaut. It was news to him that the concept of the Bussard ramjet predated his own death. He had watched the Apollo XI and XIII flights on television and that had been the extent of his interest in space flight until now.

Now his life depended on his "rammer" career. He never doubted it. That was what kept Corbett in front of the screen with the earphones on his head for fourteen hours that first day. He was afraid he might be tested.

He didn't understand all he was supposed to learn. But he was not tested either.

The second day he began to get interested. By the third day he was fascinated. Things he had never understood-relativity
and magnetic theory and abstract mathematics-he now grasped intuitively. It was marvelous!

And he ceased to wonder why the State had chosen Jerome Corbett. It was always done this way. It made sense, all kinds of sense.

The payload of a starship was small and its operating lifetime was more than a man's lifetime. A reasonably safe life-support system for one man occupied an unreasonably high proportion of the payload. The rest must go for biological package probes.

As for sending a citizen, a loyal member of the State-what for? The times would change enormously before a starship could return. The State itself might change beyond recognition. A returning rammer must adjust to a whole new culture-with no way of telling in advance what it might be like.

Why not pick a man who had already chosen to adjust to a new culture? A man whose own culture was two centuries dead before the trip started?

And a man who already owed the State his life?

The RNA was most effective. Corbett stopped wondering about Pierce's dispassionately possessive attitude. He began to think of himself as property being programmed for a purpose.

And he learned. He skimmed microtaped texts as if they were already familiar. The process was heady. He became convinced that he could rebuild a ramship with his bare hands, given the parts. He had loved figures all his life, but abstract mathematics had been beyond him until now. Field theory, monopole field equations, circuitry design. When to suspect the presence of a gravitational point source - how to locate it, use it, avoid it.

The teaching chair was his life. The rest of his time-exercise, dinner, sleep-seemed vague, uninteresting.

He exercised with about twenty others in a room too small for the purpose. Like Corbett, the others were lean and stringy, in sharp contrast to the brawny wedge-shaped men who were their guards. They followed the lead of a guard, running in place because there was no room for real running, forming precise rows for scissors jumps, pushups, sit-ups.

After fourteen hours in a teaching chair Corbett usually enjoyed the jumping about. He followed orders. And he wondered about the stick in a holster at the guard's waist. It looked like a cop's baton. It might have been just that-except for the hole in one end. Corbett never tried to find out.

Sometimes he saw Pierce during the exercise periods. Pierce and the men who tended the teaching chairs were of a third type: well fed, in adequate condition, but just on the verge of being overweight. Corbett thought of them as Olde American types.

From Pierce he learned something of the other professions open to a revived corpsicle/reprogramed criminal. Stoop labor; intensive hand cultivation of crops. Body servants. Handicrafts. And easily taught repetitive work. And the hours! The corpsicles were expected to work fourteen hours a day. And the crowding!

He was leading that life now. Fourteen hours to study, an hour of heavy exercise, an hour to eat and eight hours to sleep in a dorm that was two solid walls of people.

"Time to work, time to eat, time to sleep! Elbow to elbow every minute! The poor bastards," he said to Pierce. "What kind of a life is that?"

"It lets them repay their debt to the State as quickly as possible. Be reasonable, Corbett. V/hat would a corpsicle do with his off hours? He has no social life-he has to learn one by observing citizens. Many forms of corpsicle labor involve proximity to citizens."