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

"Well-yes."
Marchand slowly leaned back and closed his eyes. "So that means that we were all wrong. Especially me. And all our work-"
"Look, Norman! Don't ever think like that. Your work has made all the difference. If it weren't for you, people like Eisele never would have had the chance. Don't you know he was working under one of our grants?"
"No. I didn't know that." Marchand's eyes went out to the Tycho
Brahe for a moment. "But it doesn't help much. I wonder if fifty-odd thousand men and women who have given most of their lives to the deep freeze because of-my work-will feel the way you do. But thanks. You've told me what I want to know."

When Czerny entered the chart room an hour later, Marchand said at once, "Am i in good enough shape to stand a smith?"
The doctor put down his bag and took a chair before he answered. "We don't have anyone available, Norman. There hasn't been a volunteer for years."
"No. I don't mean smithed into a human body. I don't want any would-be suicide volunteer donors-you said yourself the smithed bodies sometimes suicided, anyway. I'll settle for a chimp. Why should I be any better than that young fellow-what's his name?"
"You mean Duane Ferguson."
"Sure. Why should I be any better than he is?"
"Oh, cut it out, Norman. You're too old. Your phospholipids-"
"I'm not too old to die, am I? And that's the worst that could happen."
"It wouldn't be stable! Not at your age; you just don't understand the chemistry. I couldn't promise you more than a few weeks."
Marchand said joyously, "Really! I didn't expect that much. That's more than you can promise me now."
The doctor argued, but Marchand had held up his end of many a hard-fought battle in ninety-six years, and besides, he had an advantage over Czerny. The doctor knew even better than Marchand himself that getting into a passion would kill him. At the moment when Czerny gauged the risk of a smith translation less than the risk of going on arguing about it, he frowned, shook his head grudgingly, and left.
Slowly Marchand wheeled after him.
He did not have to hurry to what might be the last act of his life. There was plenty of time. In the Institute they kept a supply of breeding chimpanzees, but it would take several hours to prepare one.
One mind had to be sacrificed in the smith imposition. The man would ultimately be able to return to his own body, his risk less than one chance in 50 of failure. But the chimp would never be the same. Marchand submitted to the beginnings of the irradiation, the delicate titration of his body fluids, the endless strapping and patching and clamping. He had seen it done, and there were no surprises in the procedure. . . . He had not known, however, that it would hurt so much.
III

Trying not to walk on his knuckles (but it was~ hard; the ape body was meant to crouch, the arms were too long to hang comfortably along his sides), Marchand waddled out into the pad area and bent his rigid chimp's spine back in order to look up at the hated thing. Dan Fleury came toward him. "Norm?" he asked tentatively. Marchand attempted to nod; it was not a success, but Fleury understood. "Norman," he said, "this is Sigmund Eisele. He invented the FTL drive."
Marchand raised one long arm and extended a hand that resisted being opened: it was used to being clawed into a fist. "Congradulazhuns," he said, as clearly as he could. Virtuously he did not squeeze the hand of the young dark-eyed man who was being introduced to him. He had been warned that chimpanzee strength maimed human beings. He was not likely to forget, but it was tempting to allow himself to consider it for a moment.
He dropped the hand and winced as pain flooded through him.
Czerny had warned him to expect it. "Unstable, dangerous, won't last," had rumbled through his conversation, "and don't forget, Norman, the sensory equipment is set high for you; you're not used to so much input: it will hurt."
But Marchand had assured the doctor he would not mind that, and indeed he didn't. He looked at the ship again. "Zo thads id," he grumbled, and again bent the backbone, the whole barrel chest of the brute he occupied, to stare at the ship on the pad. It was perhaps a hundred feet tall. "Nod mudge," he said scornfully. "De Zirian, dad was our firzd, zdood nine hoonderd feed dali and garried a dousand beople to Alpha Zendauri."
"And it brought a hundred and fifty back alive," said Eisele. He didn't emphasize the words in any way, but he said it quite clearly. "I want to tell you I've always admired you, Dr. Marchand. I hope you won't mind my company. I understand you want to go along with me out to the Tycho Brahe."
"Why zhould I mind?" He did, of course. With the best will in the world, this young fellow had thrown seventy years of dedication, plus a handsome fortune-eight million dollars of his own, countless hundreds of millions that Marchand had begged from millionaires, from government handouts, from the pennies of schoolchildren-tossed them all into the chamber pot and flushed them into history. They would say: "A nonce figure of the early twenty-first century, Norman
Marchand, or Marquand, attempted stellar colonization with primitive rocket-propelled craft. He was, of course, unsuccessful, and the toll of life and wealth in his ill-conceived venture enormous. However, after Eisele's faster-than-light became practicable . . ." They would say that he was a failure. And he was.

When Tycho Brahe blasted off to the stars, massed bands of five hundred pieces played it to its countdown, and television audiences all over the world watched it through their orbiting satellites. A President, a Governor, and half the Senate were on hand.
When Eisele's little ship took off to catch it and tell its people their efforts had been all in vain, it was like the departure of the 7:17 ferry for Jersey City. To that extent, thought Marchand, had Eisele degraded the majesty of starifight. Yet he would not have missed it for anything. Not though it meant forcing himself as super-cargo on Eisele, who had destroyed his life, and on the other smithed chimpanzee, Duane Ferguson, who was for some reason deemed to have special privileges in regard to the Brahe.
They shipped an extra FTL unit-Marchand heard one of the men call it a polyflecter, but he would not do it the honor of asking anyone what that meant-for some reason. Because it was likely to break down, so spares were needed? Marchand dismissed the question, realizing that it had not been a fear but a hope. Whatever the reason, he didn't care; he didn't want even to be here; he only regarded it as his inescapable duty.
And he entered Eisele's ship.
The interior of Eisele's damned ship was built to human scale, nine-foot ceilings and broad acceleration couches, but they had brought hammocks scaled to a chimpanzee torso for himself and Duane Ferguson. Doubtless they had looted the hammocks from the new ship. The one that would never fly-or at least not on streams of ionized gas. And doubtless this was almost the last time that a man's mind would have to leave Earth in an ape's body.
What Eisele's damned ship rode to the stars on in place of ionized gas Marchand did not understand. The whatcha-flecter, whatever the damned thing was named, was so tiny. The whole ship was a pigmy.
There was no room for reaction mass, or at least only for enough to get it off-Earth. Then the little black box-it was not really little, since it was the size of a grand piano, and it was not black, but gray, but it was a box, all right-would work its magic. They called that magic "polynomiation." What polynomiation was Marchand did not try to understand, beyond listening, or seeming to listen, to Eisele's
brief, crude attempt to translate mathematics into English. He heard just enough to recognize a few words. Space was N-dimensional. All right, that answered the whole question, as far as he was concerned, and he did not hear Eisele's tortuous effofts to explain how one jacked oneself up, so to speak, into a polynomial dimension-or no, not that, but translated the existing polynomial extensions of a standard four-space mass into higher orders-he didn't hear. He didn't hear any of it. What he was listening to was the deep liquid thump of the great ape's heart that now was sustaining his brain.
Duane Ferguson appeared, in the ape's body that he would never leave now. That was one more count of Marchand's self-indictment; he had heard them say that the odds had worked against Ferguson, and his body had died in the imposition.
As soon as he had heard what Eisele was up to, Marchand had seized on it as a chance for expiation. The project was very simple. A good test for Eisele's drive, and a mission of mercy, too. They intended to fleet after the plodding, long-gone Tycho Brahe and catch it in mid-space . . . for even now, thirty years after it had left Port Kennedy, it was still decelerating to begin its search orbit around Groombridge 1618. As Marchand strapped himself in, Eisele was explaining it all over again. He was making tests on his black box and talking at the same time. "You see, sir, we'll try to match course and velocity, but, frankly, that's the hard part. Catching them's nothing: we've got the speed. Then we'll transfer the extra polyflecter to the Tycho Brahe-"
"Yez, thanggs," said Marchand politely, but he still did not listen to the talk about the machine. As long as it existed, he would use it
-his conscience would not let him off that-but he didn't want details.
Because the thing was, there were all those wasted lives.
Every year in the Tycho Brahe's deep freeze means a month off the life of the body that lay there. Respiration was slowed, but it was not stopped. The heart did not beat, but blood was perfused through a pump; tubes dripped sugar and minerals into the torpid blood; catheters carried wastes away. And Groombridge 1618 was a flight of ninety years.
The best a forty-year-old man could hope for on arriving was to be restored into a body whose biological age was nearly fifty-while behind him on the Earth was nothing but a family long dead, friends turned into dust.
It had been worth it. Or so the colonists had thought. Driven by the worm that wriggled in the spine of the explorer, the itch that drove
him on; because of the wealth and the power and the freedom that a new world could give them, and because of the place they would have in the history books-not Washington's place, or even Christ's. They would have the place of an Adam and an Eve.
It had been worth it, all those thousands had thought when they volunteered and set out. But what would they think when they landed!
If they landed without knowing the truth, if some ship like Eisele's did not reach and tell them in mid-space, they would find the greatest disappointment any man had ever borne. The Groombridge 1618 expedition aboard the Tycho Brahe still had forty years to go on its original trip plan. With Eisele's invention driving faster-than-light commerce, there would be a planet populated by hundreds of thousands of people, factories at work, roads built, the best land taken, the history books already into their fifth chapter. . . and what would the three thousand aging adventurers think then?
Marchand moaned and shook, not entirely because the ship was taking off and the acceleration squeezed his rib cage down against his spine.