"Pohl, Frederik - Best of Frederik Pohl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

"Search me. Look, Mr. Ferguson, perhaps we'd better go outside."
"Ghwadd?" The harsh barking voice struggled against the simian body it occupied, and came closer to the sounds it meant to emit. "What did you bean-did you mean?"
He was a rude young man, Marchand thought irritably. The fellow was tiring him.
Although there was something about that insistent question- Marchand winced and felt for a moment as though he were going
to throw up. It passed, leaving him wobbly. It wasn't possible he had broken anything, he told himself. Czerny would not lie about that. But he felt as if he had.
He lost interest in the chimp-man, did not even turn his head as Fleury hurried him out of the room, whispering to him in an agitated and low-pitched chirrup like the scratching of a cricket's legs.
If a man wanted to abandon his God-given human body and put his mind, thoughts, and-yes-soul into the corpus of an anthropoid, there was nothing in that to entitle him to any special consideration from Norman Marchand.
Of course not! Marchand rehearsed the familiar argument as he waited for the ambulance. Men who volunteered for the interstellar flights he had done so much to bring about knew what they were getting into. Until some super-Batman invented the mythical FTL drive, it would always be so. At possible speeds-less than light's 186,000
m.p.s. crawl-it was a matter of decades to reach almost every worthwhile planet thatwas known.
The smith process allowed these men to use their minds to control chimpanzee bodies-easily bred, utterly exp~ndable-whi1e their own bodies rested in the deep-freeze for all the long years between the stars.
It took brave men, naturally. They were entitled to courtesy and consideration.
But so was he, and it was not courteous to blather about "evdial," whatever that was, while the man who had made their trip possible was seriously injured. .
Unless .
Marchand opened his eyes again.
"Evdial." Unless "evdial" was the closest chimpanzee vocal chords and chimpanzee lips could come to-to-unless what they had been talking about, while he was unconscious, was that utterly impossible, hopeless, and fantastic dream that he, Marchand, had turned his back upon when he began organizing the colonization campaign.
Unless someone had really found the way to FTL travel.

II

As soon as he was able the next day, Marchand got himself into a wheelchair-all by himself; he didn't want any help in this-and rolled it out into the chart room of the home the Institute had given him, rent free, for all of his life. (He had, of course, given it in the first place to the Institute.)
The Institute had put $300,000 into the chart room. Stayed and guy-wired stars flecked the volume of a forty-foot ballroom, representing in scale all the space within fifty-five light-years of So!. Every star was mapped and tagged. They had even moved a few of them slightly, a year ago, to correct for proper motion. It was that carefully done.
The twenty-six great starships the Institute had financed were there, too, or such of them as were still in space. They were out of scale, of course, but Marchand understood what they represented. He rolled his chair down the marked path to the center of the room and sat there, looking around, just under yellow Sol.
There was blue-white Sirius dominating them all, Procyon hanging just above. The two of them together were incomparably the brightest objects in the room, though red Altair was brighter in its own right
than Procyon. In the center of the chamber Sol and Alpha Centauri A made a brilliant pair.
He gazed with rheuming eyes at the greatest disappointment of his life, Alpha Centauri B. So close. So right. So sterile. It was an ironic blunder of creation that the nearest and best chance of another home had never formed planets. . . or had formed them and swept them into the Bode-area traps set by itself and its two companions.
But there were other hopes. .
Marchand sought and found Tau Ceti, yellow and pale. Only eleven light-years away, the colony should be definitely established by now. In another decade or less they should have an answer. . . if, of course, it had planets Man could live on.
That was the big question, to which they had already received so many noes. But Tau Ceti was still a good bet, Marchand told himself stoutly. It was a dimmer, cooler sun than Sol. But it was Type G, and according to spectropolarimetry, almost certainly planetiferous. And if it was another disappointment- Marchand turned his eyes to 40 Eridani A, even dimmer, even
farther away. The expedition to 40 Eridani A had been, he remembered, the fifth ship he had launched. It ought to be reaching its destination soon-this year or perhaps next. There was no sure way of estimating time when the top velocity was so close to light's own. .
But now, of course, the top velocity was more.
The sudden wash of failure almost made him physically ifi. Faster than light travel-why, how dared they!
But he didn't have time to waste on that particular emotion, or indeed on any emotion at all. He felt time draining away from him and sat up straight again, looking around. At 96, you dare not do anything slowly, not even daydream.
He glanced at and dismissed Procyon. They had tried Procyon lately-the ship would not be even halfway. They had tried almost everything. Even Epsilon Eridani and Groombridge 1618; even, far down past the probable good bets among the spectroscopic classes, 61 Cygni A and Epsilon mdi, a late and despairing try at Proxima Centauri (though they were very nearly sure it was wasted; the Alpha Centauri expedition had detected nothing like viable planets).
There had been twenty-six of them in all. Three ships lost, three returned, one still Earthbound. Nineteen were still out there.
Marchand looked for comfort at the bright green arrow that marked where the Tycho Brahe rode its jets of ionized gas, the biggest of his ships, three thousand men and women. It seemed to him
that someone had mentioned the Tycho Brahe recently. When? Why? He was not sure, but the name stuck in his mind.
The door opened and Dan Fleury walked in, glancing at the arrayed stars and ships and not seeing them. The chart room had never meant anything to Fleury. He scolded, "Damn it, Norman, you scared us witless! Why you're not in the hospital now-"
"I was in the hospital, Dan. I wouldn't stay. And finally I got it through Asa Czerny's head that I meant it, so he said I could come home if I would stay quiet and let him look in. Well, as you see, I'm quiet. And I don't care if he looks in. I only care about finding out the truth about FTL."
"Oh, cripes, Norm! Honestly, you shouldn't worry yourself-"
"Dan, for thirty years you've never used the word 'honestly' except when you were lying to me. Now give. I sent for you this morning because you know the answer. I want it.
"For God's sake, Dan!"
Fleury glanced around the room, as though he were seeing the glowing points of light for the first time . . . perhaps he was, Marchand thought.
He said at last, "Well, there is something."
Marchand waited. He had had a great deal of practice at waiting.
"There's a young fellow," said Fleury, starting over again. "He's named Eisele. A mathematician, would you believe it? He's got an idea."
Fleury pulled over a chair and sat down.
"It's far from perfect," he added.
"In fact," he said, "a lot of people think it won't work at all. Yoti know the theory, of course. Einstein, Lorentz-Fitzgerald, the whole roster-they're all against it. It's called-get this!-polynomiation."
He waited for a laugh, hopelessly. Then he said, "Although I must say he appears to have something, since the tests-"
Marchand said gently and with enormous restraint: "Dan, will you please spit it out? Let's see what you said so far. There's this fellow named Eisele, and he has something, and it's crazy, but it works."