"2-Beyond Blue Event Horizon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

He frowned, puffing at his pipe. "Wan has never been exposed to most viruses and bacteria," he said, "so I can't make any definite statement. But, no, I would hope not. In any case, the expedition has medical supplies and equipment capable of dealing with most pathologies."
"Do you know anything more about him?"
"A great deal, but not anything that changes my previous estimates, Robin." Puff, puff. "His mother was Hispanic and his father American-Anglo, and they were both Gateway prospectors. Or so it would seem. So, apparently, in some way, were the personalities he refers to as the `Dead Men,' although it is still unclear just what those are."
"Albert," I said, "look up some old Gateway missions, at least ten years back. See if you can find one that had an American and a Hispanic woman on it-and didn't come back."
"Sure thing, Bob." Some day I must tell him to change to a snappier vocabulary, but actually he works very well as he is. He said almost at once, "There is no such mission. However, there was a launch which contained a pregnant Hispanic woman, still unreported. Shall I display the specs?"
"Sure thing, Albert," I said, but he is not programmed to pick up that sort of nuance. The specs didn't tell much. I hadn't known the woman; she was before my time. But she had taken a One out after surviving a mission in which her husband and the other three crew members had been killed in a Five. And had never been heard of again. The mission was a simple go-out-and-see-what-you-get. What she had got had been a baby, in some strange place.
"That doesn't account for Wan's father, does it?"
"No, Robin, but perhaps he was on another mission. If we assume that the Dead Men are in some way related to unreturned missions, there must have been several."
I said, "Are you suggesting that the Dead Men are actual prospectors?"
"Sure thing, Robin."
"But how? You mean their brains might have been preserved?"
"Doubt it, Robin," he said, rekindling his pipe thoughtfully. "There's insufficient data, but I'd say whole-brain storage is no more than a point-one probability."
"Then what are the other points?"
"Perhaps a readout of the chemical storage of memory-not a high probability, perhaps put it at point-three. Which is still the highest probability we've got. Voluntary interface on the part of the subjects-for instance, if they talked all their memories onto tape somehow-really low. Point-zero zero one, tops. Direct mental link-what you might call telepathy of some sort-about the same. Means unknown, point-five plus. Of course, Robin," he added hurriedly, "you realize that all of these estimates are based on insufficient data and on inadequate hypotheses."
"I suppose you'd do better if you could talk to the Dead Men direct"
"Sure thing, Bob. and I am about to request such a hookup through the Herter-Hall shipboard computer, but it needs careful programming beforehand. It is not a very good computer, Robin." He hesitated. "Uh, Robin? There is one other interesting thing."
"What's that?"
"As you know, several large ships were docked at the Food Factory when it was discovered. It has been under frequent observation since, and the number of ships remained the same-not counting the Herter-Hall ship and the one in which Wan arrived two days ago, of course. But it is not certain they are the same ships."
"What?"
"It isn't certain, Robin," he emphasized. "One Heechee ship looks very much like another. But careful scan of the approach photos seems to show a different orientation on the part of at least one of the large ones. Possibly all three. As though the ships that were there had left, and new ones had docked."
A cold feeling went up and down my spine. "Albert," I said, finding it hard to get the words out, "do you know what that suggests to me?"
"Sure thing, Robin," he said solemnly, "it suggests that the Food Factory is still in operation. That it is converting the cometary gases to CHON-food. And sending them somewhere."
I swallowed hard, but Albert was still talking. "Also," he said, "there is quite a lot of ionizing radiation in the environment I have to admit I don't know where it comes from."
"Is that dangerous to the Herter-Halls?"
"No, Robin, I would say not. No more than, say, piezovision broadcasts are to you. It is not the risk, it is that I am puzzled about the source."
"Can't you ask the Herter-Halls to check?"
"Sure thing, Robin. I already have. But it'll take fifty days to get the answer."
I dismissed him and leaned back in my chair to think about the Heechee and their queer ways. .
And then it hit.
My desk chairs are all built to maximum comfort and stability, but this time I almost tipped it over. In a split second, I was in pain. Not just in pain; I was dizzy, disoriented, even hallucinating. My head felt as though it were about to burst, and my lungs seared like flame. I had never felt so sick, in both mind and body, and at the same time I found myself fantasizing incredible feats of sexual athletics.
I tried to get up, and couldn't. I flopped back in the chair, absolutely helpless. "Harriet!" I croaked. "Get a doctor!"
It took her a full three seconds to respond, and then her image wavered worse than Morton. "Mr. Broadhead," she said, looking queerly worried, "I cannot account for it, but the circuits are all busy. I- I- I-" It was not just her voice repeating, her head and body looked like a short loop of video tape, over and over shaping the same beginning of a word and snapping back to begin it again.
I fell off the chair onto the floor, and my last coherent thought was:
The fever.
It was back. Worse than I had ever felt it before. Worse, perhaps, than I could live through, and so bad, so painful, so terrifyingly, psychotically strange that I was not sure I wanted to.


5
Janine


The difference between the ages of ten and fourteen is immense. After three and a half years in a photon-powered spaceship en route to the Oort cloud, Janine was no longer the child who had left. She had not stopped being a child. She had just reached that early maturation plateau wherein the individual recognizes that it still has a great deal of growing to do. Janine was not in a hurry to become an adult. She was simply working at getting the job done. Every day. All the time. With whatever tools came to hand.
When she left the others, on the day when she met Wan, she was not particularly searching for anything. She simply wanted to be alone. Not for any really private purpose. Not even because, or not only because, she was tired of her family. What she wanted was something of her own, an experience not shared, an evaluation not helped by always-present grownups; she wanted the look and touch and smell of the strangeness of the Food Factory, and she wanted it to be hers.
So she pushed herself at random along the passages, sucking from time to time at a squeeze bottle of coffee. Or what seemed to be "coffee" to her. It was a habit Janine had learned from her father, although, if you had asked her, she would have denied that she had learned any.
All of her senses thirsted for inputs. The Food Factory was the most fabulously exciting, delightfully scary thing that had ever happened to her. More than the launch from Earth when she was a mere child. More than the stained shorts that had announced she had become a woman. More than anything. Even the bare walls of the passages were exciting, because they were Heechee metal, a zillion years old, and still glowing with the gentle blue light their makers had built into them. (What sort of eyes had seen by that light when it was new?) She patted herself gently from chamber to chamber, only the balls of her feet ever touching the floor. In this room were walls of rubbery shelves (what had they held?), in that squatted a huge truncated sphere, top and bottom sliced off, mirror chrome in appearance, queerly powdery to the touch-what was it for? Some of the things she could guess at. The thing that looked like a table certainly was a table. (The lip around it was no doubt there to keep things from skittering off it in the Food Factory's gentle gravity.) Some of the objects had been identified for them by Vera, accessing the information stores of Heechee artifacts cataloged by the big data sources back on Earth. The cubicles with cobwebby green tracings on the walls were thought to have been for sleeping accommodations; but who was to know if dumb Vera was right? No matter. The objects themselves were thrilling. So was the presence of space to move around in. Even to get lost in. For until they reached the Food Factory, Janine had never, ever, not once in her life, had the chance to get lost. The idea made her itch with scary pleasure. Especially as the quite adult part of her fourteen-year-old brain was always aware that, no matter how lost she got, the Food Factory simply was not large enough for her to stay lost.
So it was a safe thrill. Or seemed so.
Until she found herself trapped by the farside docks, as something-Heechee? Space monster? Crazed old castaway with a knife?-came shambling out of the hidden passages toward her.
And then it was none of those things, it was Wan.
Of course, she didn't know his name. "Don't you come any closer!" she whimpered, heart in mouth, radio in hand, forearms hugged across her new breasts. He didn't. He stopped. He stared at her, eyes popping, mouth open, tongue almost hanging out. He was tall, skinny. His face was triangular, with a long, beaked nose. He was wearing what looked like a skirt and what looked like a tank-top, both dirty. He smelled male. He was shaking as he sniffed the air, and he was young. Surely he was not much older than Janine herself and the only person less than triple her age she had seen in years; and when he let himself drop gently to his knees and began to do what Janine had never seen any other person do she moaned while she giggled-amusement, relief, shock, hysteria. The shock was not at what he was doing. The shock came from meeting a boy. In her sleep Janine had dreamed wildly, but never of this.
For the next few days Janine could not bear to let Wan out of her sight. She felt herself to be his mother, his playmate, his teacher, his wife. "No, Wan! Sip it slowly, it's hot!" "Wan, do you mean to say you've been all alone since you were three?" "You have really beautiful eyes, Wan." She didn't mind that he was not sophisticated enough to respond by telling her that she had beautiful eyes, too, because she could definitely tell that she fascinated him in all her parts.