"Paul Preuss - Re-Entry" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preuss Paul)

Countdown; Earth, 204 N.E.

Physician, heal thyself.
тАФLuke iv, 23

The snake eats itself, the dog chases its tail.
тАФG. Spencer Brown, Laws of Form


"Can you go home?" Susan had asked him, and in his profound hangover he'd
profoundly misunderstood her. What she'd wanted to know was whether he was
awake, and strong enough, and steady enough, to walk out of her life. Preferably
forever. It was not a friendly question.
But he'd taken it metaphysically, and for a moment his foggy brain had wrestled
with possibilities. Could he go home again? What would he do differently, if
suddenly he were given the chance to do it all over?
'Take these," she'd said, thrusting a triad of pills at his face. His half open
eyes had recognized a battery of lipotro-pin derivatives: energy, good will, a
sense of well-being, waiting under bis nose. The clouds of depression would
lift, the sun would come out, the bluebird of happiness would sing.
He'd shifted bis gaze to the gray-brown San Francisco fog outside Susan's soleri
window. Lying on his back on her couch, looking straight up, be couldn't see
anything else. Cold poisonous tentacles of despair, coiling over the glass half
dome. And inside bis skin, it was worse: he could smell the dried sweat and the
vomit, taste the congealed mucus on his tongue. Oh, he'd been a very naughty boy
this time....
"Come on, Phil, take it and get out of here. Chemical sympathy is all you get.
I've got work to do." -
He'd taken the pills, dreading the memories they would restore. Then Susan had
hauled him off the couch and pushed him through the door.
Those were his first wobbly steps on the way home.
Stage One; from Earth to Darwin, 206 N.E.тАФand before
Humboldt drove upward into star-spangled space, balanced on a column of fire
from her annihilator engines. All her crystal promenades and portals were
ablaze. On this "night" (by the ship's clock) the regal liner was more than
three months from Earth, and only hours from Earth Station, the binary black
hole system that gave forth on all the known accessible worlds of the Starry
Archipelago.
Barring some unimaginable last minute emergency, Humboldt would proceed
unchecked, diving with headlong grace into the space-time vortex around the
orbiting holes, to emerge in no time in the vicinity of Darwin's Star a few
dozen light-years away. The passage of the holes was scheduled for three o'clock
in the morning, ship's time; before then there would not be the slightest
interruption in the smooth .8-gee acceleration Humboldt maintained for the
comfort of her passengers.
Those passengers gathered now by twos and threes and fours, to recline in
leather-cushioned luxury beneath the sunset desert sky and battlemented mud
walls of ancient Timbuktu. Palm fronds rattled in the cool breeze from the air
conditioners. Boredom alone would have brought them to tonight's lecture in the
Sun Grove lounge; that it was to be delivered by Philip Holder insured a full