"Jack Williamson - Dark Star One" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

JACK WILLIAMSON

DARK STAR ONE

Carlos Mondragon. A lean brown man without friends or money or even much
English, he came from Cuerno del Oro, a poor pueblito in the mountains of
Chihuahua. Owning only the computer skills he had taught himself, he had stowed
away on the quantum ship to escape a world with no room for him, hoping to find
a dream.

Don Diego had warned him of the strange quantum craft, which moved at a speed
that stopped time. One light-year or a billion, the Don swore, a quantum flight
would be less than an instant to those aboard, ending only when or if the ship
was about to collide with some great star. Which might happen anywhere or not at
all.

He had never expected a black dwarf sun to stop them, or the flight to end on a
planet of ice and eternal night. Yet, because of la rubia, he could not be
sorry. La rubia, that was his name for the beautiful Doctora Rima Virili, whom
he admired for her bright hair and her good shape and her tender smile for her
small daughter.

She was the famous Anglo scientist with letters after her name, he only the
illegal mojado who had yet to earn his place among these brave pioneers who were
risking quantum flight for the chance to claim some new and better planet for
humanidad. Her beauty frightened him; no rough campesino could ever hope to
touch her.

"The ship's a seed," she had told Captain Stecker, when he did not wish to land.
"The Mission exists to sow the human seed across the universe. We were meant to
root and grow wherever we happened to fall. This may be hard soil, but we come
prepared to terraform any soil. I think we can survive."

They were in the ship's control room. The holoscreens that arched above them
were dark with imaged space, the black sun a round shadow on the stars, the ice
planet a smaller blot beside it. The captain was a graceful, smiling Anglo with
gold-enameled fingernails and a golden band around his flowing amber hair.

Handsome as un torero, the captain had the manner of Don Alfonso Madera. Cuerno
del Oro meant horn of gold. Don Alfonso was a clever picaro who had stolen an
ancient registro from the church. He made its faded pages into maps of the lost
Cuerno mine, which he sold to turistas, bragging in la cantina that he could
make los gringos believe that baby shit was gold.

"Anywhere but here." Without courage of his own, the captain drank it from a
bottle; Mondragon heard the thickness in his voice. "We'll find some better
world to settle."

"A problem, sir," Cruzet said. "This is the only planet here."
Los Doctores Cruzet and Andersen were Mondragon's amigos. They had let him prove