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

"Well, what does it feel like?"
"Janine," he said severely, "you are very childish. Why do you ask questions when you can see for yourself?" And he pushed down on the shimmery wire covering, and the catch midway down the side rustled and locked. "It is best if you go to sleep," he called down to her, through the shining blue network of wire.
"But I'm not sleepy," she objected reasonably. "I'm not anything. I don't feel a thing. . . ."
And then she did.
It was not what she had expected out of her own experience of the fever; there was no obsessive interference with her own personality, no point source of feelings. There was only a warm and saturating glow. She was surrounded. She was an atom in a soup of sensation. The other atoms had no shape or individuality. They were not tangible or hard-edged. She could still see Wan, peering worriedly down at her through the wire when she opened her eyes, and these other-souls?-were not at all as real or as immediate. But she could feel them, as she had never felt another presence. Around her. Beside her. Within her. They were warm. They were comforting.
When Wan at last wrenched open the metal wire and pulled at her arm, she lay there staring at him. She did not have the strength to rise, or the desire. He had to help her up, and she leaned on his shoulder as they started back.
They were less than halfway back to the Herter-Hall ship when the other members of the family interrupted them, and they were furious. "Stupid little brat!" Paul raged. "You ever do anything like that again and I'll paddle your pink little ass for you!"
"She won't!" her father said grimly. "I will see to that, right now; and as to you, little miss, I will see to you later."

They had all become so quarrelsome! No one paddled Janine's bottom for trying out the dreaming couch. No one punished her at all. They all punished each other, instead, and did it all the time. The truce that had held for three and a half years, because each of them enforced it for himself, the alternative being mutual murder, dissolved. Paul and the old man did not speak for two days, because Peter had dismantled the couch without consultation. Lurvy and her father spat and shouted at each other because she had programmed too much salt in their meal, and then again, when it was his turn, because he had programmed too little. And as to Lurvy and Paul-they no longer slept together; they hardly spoke; they would surely not have stayed married, if there had been a divorce court within 5,000 A.U.
But if there had been a source of authority of any kind within 5,000 A.U., at least the disputes could have been resolved. Someone could have made their decisions. Should they return? Should they try to overpower the Food Factory's guidance? Should they go with Wan to explore the other place-and if so, who should go and who should remain behind? They could not agree on grand plans. They could not even agree on the decisions of every hour, to take a machine apart and risk its destruction, or to leave it alone and give up the hope of some wonderful discovery that could change everything. They could not agree on who should talk to the Dead Men by radio, or what to ask them. Wan showed them, willingly enough, how to try to tempt the Dead Men into conversation, and they put Vera's sound system in linkage with the "radio". But Vera could not handle much give and take; and when the Dead Men did not understand her questions, or did not want to participate, or were simply too insane to be of any use, Vera was beaten.
All this was awful for Janine, but worst of all was Wan himself. The squabbling made him confused and indignant. He stopped following her around. And after one sleep, when she sat up and looked around for him, he was gone.
Fortunately for Janine's pride, everyone else was gone, too- Paul and Lurvy outside the ship to reorient the antennae; her father asleep, so that she had time to deal with her jealousy. Let him be a pig! she thought. It was stupid of him not to realize that she had many friends, while he had only her; but he would find out! She was busy writing long letters to her neglected correspondents when she heard Paul and her sister returning; and when she told them that Wan had been gone for at least an hour she was unprepared for their reaction. "Pa!" Lurvy cried, rattling at the curtain of her father's private. "Wake up! Wan's gone!"
As the old man came blinking out, Janine said disagreeably, "Now, what's the matter with all of you?"
"You don't understand, do you?" Paul asked coldly. "What if he's taken the ship?"
It was a possibility that had never occurred to Janine, and it was like a blow in the face. "He wouldn't!"
"Would he not?" snarled her father. "And how do you know that, little minx? And if he does, what of us?" He finished zipping his coverall and stood up, glowering at them. "I have told you all," he said-but looking at Lurvy and Paul, so that Janine understood she was not a part of their "all"-"I have told you that we must find a definite solution. If we are to go with him in his ship, we must do it. If not, we cannot take the risk that he will take it into his foolish little mind to go back without warning. That is assuredly certain."
"And how do we do that?" Lurvy demanded. "You're preposterous, Pa. We can't guard the ship day and night."
"And your sister cannot guard the boy, yes," the old man nodded. "So we must either immobilize the ship, or immobilize the boy."
Janine flew at him. "You monsters!" she choked. "You've been planning this all out when we weren't around!" Her sister caught and held her.
"Calm down, Janine," she ordered. "Yes, it's true we've talked about it-we had to! But nothing's settled, certainly not that we will hurt Wan."
"Then settle it!" Janine flared. "I vote we go with Wan!"
"If he hasn't gone already, by himself," Paul put in.
"He hasn't!"
Lurvy said practically, "If he has, it's too late for us to do anything about it. Outside of that, I'm with Janine. We go! What do you say, Paul?"
He hesitated. "I-guess so," he conceded. "Peter?"
The old man said with dignity, "If you are all agreed, then what does it matter how I vote? There is only the question remaining who is to go and who is to stay. I propose-"
Lurvy stopped him. "Pa," she said, "I know what you are going to say, but it won't work. We need to leave at least one person here, to keep in contact with Earth. Janine's too young. It can't be me, because I'm the best pilot and this is a chance to learn something about piloting a Heechee ship. I don't want to go without Paul, and that leaves you."

They took Vera apart, component by component, and redistributed her around the Food Factory. Fast memory, inputs, and displays went into the dreaming chamber, slow memory lining the passageway outside, transmission still in their old ship. Peter helped, silent and taciturn; the meaning of what they were doing was that further communications of interest would come from the exploring party, via the radio system of the Dead Men. Peter was helping to write himself off, and knew it. There was plenty of food in the ship, Wan told them; but Paul would not be satisfied with the automatic replenishment of God knew what product of the Food Factory, and he made them carry aboard rations of their own, as much as they could stow. Whereupon Wan insisted that they stock up with water, and so they depleted the recycling stocks in the ship to fill his plastic bags and loaded them, too. Wan's ship had no beds, None were needed, Wan pointed out, because the acceleration cocoons were enough to protect them during maneuvers, and to keep them from floating around while they slept in the rest of the voyage-suggestion vetoed by both Lurvy and Paul, who dismantled the sleeping pouches from their private and reinstalled them in the ship. Personal possessions: Janine wanted her secret stash of perfume and books, Lurvy her personal locked bag, Paul his cards for solitaire. It was long and hard work, though they discovered they could ease it by sailing the plastic waterbags and the softer, solider other stores along the corridors in a game of slow-motion catch; but at last it was done. Peter sat sourly propped against a corridor wall, watching the others mill about, and tried to think of what had been forgotten. To Janine it seemed as though they were already treating him as though he were absent, if not dead, and she said, "Pop? Don't take it so hard. We'll all be back as soon as we can."
He nodded. "Which comes to," he said, "let me see, forty-nine days each way, plus as long as you decide to stay in this place." But then he pushed himself up, and allowed Lurvy and Janine to kiss him. Almost cheerfully, he said, "Bon voyage. Are you sure you have forgotten nothing?"
Lurvy looked around, considering. "I think not-unless you think we should tell your friends we are coming, Wan?"
"The Dead Men?" he shrilled, grinning. "They will not know. They are not alive, you know, they have no sense of time."
"Then why do you like them so much?" Janine demanded.
Wan caught the note of jealousy and scowled at her. "They are my friends," he said. "They cannot be taken seriously all the time, and they often lie. But they do not ever make me feel afraid of them."
Lurvy caught her breath. "Oh, Wan," she said, touching him. "I know we haven't been as nice as we might. We've all been under a great strain. We're really better people than we must seem to you."
Old Peter had had enough. "Go you now," he snarled. "Prove this to him, do not stand talking forever. And then come back and prove it to me!"


6
After the Fever


Less than two hours-the fever had never been so short before. Nor had it ever been as intense. The most susceptible one percent of the population had simply been out of it for four hours, and nearly everyone had been severely affected.
I was one of the lucky ones, because after the fever I was only stuck in my room, with nothing more than a bump on the head from falling over. I wasn't trapped in a wrecked bus, crashed out of a jet-liner, struck by a runaway car, or bleeding to death on an operating table while surgeons and nurses writhed helplessly on the floor. All I had was one hour, fifty-one minutes and forty-four seconds of delirious misery, and that diluted because it was shared with eleven billion other people.
Of course, everybody in all those eleven billion was trying to get in touch with everybody else, all at once, and so communications were jammed for fair. Harriet formed herself in the tank to tell me that at least twenty-five calls were coming in for me-my science program, my legal program, three or four accountancy programs from my holdings, and quite a few real, live people. None of them, she told me apologetically when I asked, was Essie; the circuits to Tucson were out entirely at the moment, and I couldn't place a call from my end either. None of the machines had been affected by the madness. They never were. The only time something went wrong with them was when some live person had injected himself into the circuit, for maintenance or redesign. But, as statistically that was happening a million times a minute, somewhere in the world, with some machine or another, it was not surprising that some things took a little while to get going again.
First order of business was business; I had to pick up the pieces. I gave Harriet a hierarchy of priorities, and she began feeding me reports. Quick bulletin from the food mines: no significant damage. Real estate: some minor incidents of fire and flooding, nothing that mattered. Someone had left a barrier open in the fish factories and six hundred million fingerlings swam out to lose themselves in the open sea; but I was only a minority stockholder in them anyway. Taken all in all, I had come out of the fever smelling of roses, I thought, or anyway a lot better than a lot of others. The fever had struck the Indian subcontinent after midnight of a day that already had seen one of the worst hurricanes the Bay of Bengal had produced in fifty years. The death toll was immense. Rescue efforts had simply stopped for two hours. Tens, maybe even hundreds, of millions of people had been simply unable to drag themselves to high ground, and southern Bangladesh was a swamp of corpses. Add in a refinery explosion in California, a train wreck in Wales, and a few as yet uncatalogued disasters-the computers did not yet have an estimate of deaths, but the news reports were calling it the worst ever.
By the time I had taken all the urgent-urgent calls the elevators were running again. I wasn't a captive any more. Looking out the window, I could see the Washington streets were normal enough. My trip to Tucson, on the other hand, was well bollixed. Since half the jets in the air had been on automatic pilot for two hours, seriously depleting their fuel, they had been landing where they could, and the lines had equipment in all sorts of wrong places. The schedules were scrambled. Harriet booked me the best she could, but the first space she could confirm was not until noon the next day. I couldn't even call Essie, because the circuits were still jammed. That was only an annoyance, not a problem. If I really wanted to get through, there were priorities at my disposal-the rich have their perks. But the rich have their pleasures, too, and I decided it would be fun to surprise Essie by dropping in on her.
And meanwhile I had time to spare.
And all this time my science program had been bursting with things to tell me. That was the dessert after the spinach and liver. I had put it off until I had a chance for a good, long natter; and that time had arrived, "Harriet," I said, "put him on." And Albert Einstein took form in the tank, leaning forward and twitching with excitement. "What is it, Al," I asked, "something good?"