"Robert F. Young - In Saturn's Rings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

one had forced him to, and he had not auctioned them off for nothing. With them he had bought a safe
little island of changelessnzss in the giddy onrushing torrent of time.



Night passed, and came the day, the pale day with its cold and distant sun and its wan, cold stars.
Gliding downward along an ever-shrinking orbital path, firing his retros with the passing of each
dawn, Old Matt North became Young Matt North again тАФ Young Matt North standing in a bustling bar
that bewildered him, rubbing shoulders with strangely garbed, gesticulating people who frightened him;
Young Matt North recently returned from a Hyperion-Sirius XXI run, adrift in a civilization that, thanks
to the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction, had left him almost two decades behind.
Beside him stood the man from the House of Christopoulos who had spotted him from across the
room. He had come over and bought him a drink and told him glowingly about the Great Opportunity.
"You paint a pretty picture," Young Matt said. "I'll say that much for you."
The man was young тАФ almost as young as Young Matt North. His cheeks were smooth and plump,
and you could smell money on his breath. Zeus I was his shepherd тАФhe did not want.
"As true a picture as it is pretty, Matthew North," he said. "The House of Christopoulos takes care of
its spacemen. It doesn't cast them adrift between runs the way the commercial carriers do. Zeus I was a
spaceman once himselfтАФhe knows what it's like to be cast adrift. That's why he spared no expense
when he built the Haven.
That's why he duplicated a sane and sensible setting out of the past instead of building a modern
setting. That's why he guarantees his jet-tractor pilots a job for life. Thus far, there are only two, and he
needs but one more, but the Haven is large enough to accommodate a hundred. And it will never change.
The Hostel will always be there waiting for you when you return, and during your six-months layovers
there will be girls for the asking, and taverns with open doors."

II

It had been true тАФ every word of it. And it was as true today as it had been then ...
Old Matt North berthed his jet-tractor, climbed out through the locks carrying his duffel bag, and
walked around the big platform-lift on which he had lowered so many capsules into the subterranean
pneumotube that led to the crypts beneath the House of Christopoulos. The little port gave directly onto
the single street of the Haven, and he walked down the street toward the big stone structure at its farther
end. As always, the sight of the Hostel reassured him. There was a permanence about stone that could
not be duplicated, a solidity that other materials lacked. Inside, there would be warmth and welcome,
and more food than he could eat and more wine than he could drink. And there would be girls, too. If he
still wanted them.
He wondered if he did.
It was mid-morning, and a cold wind was blowing in from the surrounding ice-flats. It outlined his
spacetogs against his spare frame and ridged his skin with gooseflesh. Beyond the Hostel, the great pile
of the House of Christopoulos stood massively against the gray, star-starved sky. It had been patterned
after the Parthenon, but in the distance-decimated sunlight its noble Doric columns and magnificent
entablature tools on a pale cast that was out of keeping with the trabeate architecture. And while the
force-field that played darkly between the columns let in what little light there was, it gave back nothing in
return. The over-all effect was one of Gothic gloom.
Usually the House awoke vague longings in the deeps of Matthew North's being. Today it did not
тАФperhaps because he was not really seeing it.
He was seeing the girls he had known instead тАФ the girls he had slept with down through the
decades, some of whom were old and withered women now, and some of whom had lain for centuries
dead. The pretty little call girls he had had with the sweet sad swiftness of a hummingbird's flight and then