"John Varley - Titan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

Titan by John Varley

Scanned by R.Morris
Checked by Word98
Proofed by dyslexic
date April, 2000

Disclaimer
This text was made in order to preserve the contents of the original book that had suffered severe age damage.
The original publishers notes reproduced below should be adhered to.

An Orbit Book

First published in Great Britain simultaneously by Futura Publications Limited and Sidgwick & Jackson Limited in 1979 Copyright 1979 by John Varley
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purcl-&ser
ISBN 0 7088 8044 4
Printed in Great Britain by Hazell Watson & Vincy Ltd Aylesbury, Bucks


TITAN - John Varley

CHAPTER ONE

"Rocky, would you take a look at this?"
"That's Capn Jones to you. Show me in the morning." "It's sort of important."
Cirocco was at her wash basin, her face covered in soap. She groped for a towel and wiped the greenish goop away. It was the only kind of soap the recyclers would eat.
She squinted at the two pictures Gaby handed her. "What is it?"
'Just the twelfth satellite of Saturn." Gaby was not entirely successful at hiding her excitement.
"No fooling?" Cirocco frowned from one picture to the other. "Just a lot of little black dots to me."
"Well, yeah. You can't see anything without the comparometer. That's it right there." She indicated an area with her little %er.
"Let's go take a look."
Cirocco rummaged through her locker and found a pea-green shipsuit that smelled as good as any of them. Most of the handy velcro patches were peeling.
Her room was at the bottom of the carousel, midway between
ladders three and four. She followed Gaby around the curving floor, then pursued her up the ladder.
Each rung was a little easier than the last until, at the hub, they were weightless. They pushed off from the slowly rotating ring and drifted down the central corridor to the science module. SCIMOD in NASA-ese. It was kept dark to make the instruments easier to read, and was as colourful as the inside of a juke- box. Cirocco liked it. Green lights blinked and banks of television screens hissed white noise through confetti clouds of snow. Ugene Springfield and the Polo sisters floated around the central holo tank. Their faces were bathed in the red glow.
Gaby handed the plates to the computer, punched up an image-intensifying program, and indicated the screen Cirocco should watch. The pictures were sharpened, combined, then rapidly alternated. Two miniscule dots blinked, not far from each other.
"There it is," Gaby said proudly. "Small proper motion, but the plates are only twenty-three hours apart."
Gene called to them. "Orbital elements are coming in," he said. Gaby and Cirocco joined him. Cirocco glanced down and saw his arm go possessively around Gaby's waist, looked quickly away, noting that the Polo sisters had seen it and were just as careful not to notice. They had all learned to stay out of each other's affairs.
Saturn sat in the middle of the tank, fat and brassy. Eight blue circles were drawn around it, each larger than the last, each in the equatorial plane of the rings. There was a sphere on each circle, like a single pearl on a string, and beside the pearls were names and numbers: Mnemosyne, Janus, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, and Hyperion. Far beyond those orbits was a tenth one, visibly tilted. That was Iapetus. Phoebe, the most distant, could not be shown on the scale they were using.
Now another circle was drawn in. It was an eccentric ellipse, almost tangent to the orbits of Rhea and Hyperion, cutting right across the circle that represented Titan. Cirocco studied it, then straightened. Looking up, she saw deep lines etched on Gaby's forehead as her fingers flew over the keyboard. With each pro- gram she called up, the numbers on her screen changed.
"It had a very close call with Rhea about three million years ago," she noted. "It's safely above Titan's orbit, though perturbations must be a factor. It's far from stabilized."
"Meaning what?" Cirocco asked.
"Captured asteroid?" Gaby suggested, one eyebrow raised doubtfully.
"The proximity to the equatorial plane would make that un- likely," one of the Polo sisters said. April or August? Cirocco wondered. After eighteen months together she still couldn't tell them apart.
"I was afraid you'd see that." Gaby chewed a knuckle. "Yet if it was formed with the others, it ought to be less eccentric."
The Polo shrugged. '"There are ways to explain it. A catastrophic event in the recent past. It would be easy to move it."
Cirocco frowned. "Just how big is it, then?"
The Polo--August, she was almost sure it was August- looked at her with that calm, strangely unsettling face. "I should say about two or three kilometers. Possibly less."
"Is that all?"
Gene grinned. "You give me the numbers, I'll land on it." "What do you mean, 'Is that all'?" Gaby said. "It couldn't have