"Smith, Cordwainer - Golden The Ship Was - Oh - Oh - Oh (UC)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Cordwainer)

GOLDEN THE SHIP WAS-OH! OH! OH!
AGGRESSION STARTED VERY FAR AWAY.
War with Raumsog came about twenty years after the great cat scandal which, for a while, threatened to cut the entire planet Earth from the desperately essential santaclara drug. It was a short war and a bitter one.
Corrupt, wise, weary old Earth fought with masked weapons, since only hidden weapons could maintain so ancient a sovereignty-sovereignty which had long since lapsed into a titular paramountcy among the communities of mankind. Earth won and the others lost, because the leaders of Earth never put other considerations ahead of survival. And this time, they thought, they were finally and really threatened.
The Raumsog war was never known to the general public except for the revival of wild old legends about golden ships.
1
On Earth the lords of the Instrumentality met. The presiding chairman looked about and said, "Well, gentlemen, all of us have been bribed by Raumsog. We have all been paid off individually. I myself received
-'"T
six ounces of stroon in pure form. Will the rest of you show better
bargains?"
Around the room, the councilors announced the amounts of their
bribes.
The chairman turned to the secretary. "Enter the bribes in the record
and then mark the record off-the-record."
The others nodded gravely.
"Now we must fight. Bribery is not enough. Raumsog has been threatening to attack Earth. It's been cheap enough to let him threaten, but obviously we don't mean to let him do it."
"How are you going to stop him, Lord Chairman?" growled a gloomy old member. "Get out the golden ships?"
"Exactly that." The chairman looked deadly serious.
There was a murmurous sigh around the room. The golden ships had been used against an inhuman life-form many centuries before. They were hidden somewhere in nonspace and only a few officials of Earth knew how much reality there was to them. Even at the level of the lords of the Instrumentality the council did not know precisely what
they were.
"One ship," said the chairman of the lords of the Instrumentality,
"will be enough." It was.
2
The dictator Lord Raumsog on his planet knew the difference some
weeks later.
"You can't mean that," he said. "You can't mean it. There is no such ship that size. The golden ships are just a story. No one ever saw a picture of one."
"Here is a picture, my Lord," said the subordinate.
Raumsog looked at it. "It's a trick. Some piece of trick photography. They distorted the size. The dimensions are wrong. Nobody has a ship that size. You could not build it, or if you did build it, you could not operate it. There just is not any such thing-" He babbled on for a few more sentences before he realized that his men were looking at the picture and not at him.
He calmed down.
The boldest of the officers resumed speaking. "That one ship is ninety million miles long, Your Highness. It shimmers like fire, but moves so fast that we cannot approach it. But it came into the center of our fleet almost touching our ships, stayed there twenty or thirty thousandths of a second. There it was, we thought. We saw the evidence of life on board: light beams waved; they examined us and then, of course, it lapsed back into nonspace. Ninety million miles, Your Highness. Old Earth has some stings yet and we do not know what the ship is doing."
The officers stared with anxious confidence at their overlord.
Raumsog sighed. "If we must fight, we'll fight. We can destroy that too. After all, what is size in the spaces between the stars? What difference does it make whether it is nine miles or nine million or ninety million?" He sighed again. "Yet I must say ninety million miles is an awful big size for a ship. I don't know what they are going to do with it."
He did not.
3
It is strange-strange and even fearful-what the love of Earth can do to men. Tedesco, for example.
Tedesco's reputation was far-flung. Even among the Go-captains, whose thoughts were rarely on such matters, Tedesco was known for his raiment, the foppish arrangement of his mantle of office and his be-jeweled badges of authority. Tedesco was known too for his languid manner and his luxurious sybaritic living. When the message came, it found Tedesco in his usual character.
He was lying on the air-draft with his brain pleasure centers plugged into the triggering current. So deeply lost in pleasure was he that the food, the women, the clothing, the books of his apartments were completely neglected and forgotten. All pleasure save the pleasure of electricity acting on the brain was forgotten.
So great was the pleasure that Tedesco had been plugged into the current for twenty hours without interruption-a manifest disobedience of the rule which set six hours as maximum pleasure.
And yet, when the message came-relayed to Tedesco's brain by the infinitesimal crystal set there for the transmittal of messages so secret that even thought was too vulnerable to interception-when the mes-
sage came Tedesco struggled through layer after layer of bliss and unconsciousness.
The ships of gold-the golden ships-for Earth is in danger. Tedesco struggled. Earth is in danger. With a sigh of bliss he made the effort to press the button which turned off the current. And with a sigh of cold reality he took a look at the world about him and turned to the job at hand. Quickly he prepared to wait upon the lords of the Instrumentality.
The chairman of the lords of the Instrumentality sent out the Lord Admiral Tedesco to command the golden ship. The ship itself, larger than most stars, was an incredible monstrosity. Centuries before it had frightened away nonhuman aggressors from a forgotten corner of the galaxies.
The lord admiral walked back and forth on his bridge. The cabin was small, twenty feet by thirty. The control area of the ship measured nothing over a hundred feet. All the rest was a golden bubble of the feinting ship, nothing more than jhin and incredibly rigid foam with tiny wires cast across it so as to give the illusion of a hard metal and strong defenses.
The ninety million miles of length were right. Nothing else was.
The ship was a gigantic dummy, the largest scarecrow ever conceived by the human mind.
Century after century it had rested in nonspace between the stars, waiting for use. Now it proceeded helpless and defenseless against a militant and crazy dictator Raumsog and his horde of hard-fighting and very real ships.
Raumsog had broken the disciplines of space. He had killed the pin-lighters. He had emprisoned the Go-captains. He had used renegades and apprentices to pillage the immense interstellar ships and had armed the captive vessels to the teeth. In a system which had not known real war, and least of all war against Earth, he had planned well.
He had bribed, he had swindled, he had propagandized. He expected Earth to fall before the threat itself. Then he launched his attack.
With the launching of the attack, Earth itself changed. Corrupt rascals became what they were in title: the leaders and the defenders of mankind.
Tedesco himself had been an elegant fop. War changed him into an aggressive captain, swinging the largest vessel of all time as though it were a tennis bat