"Timothy Zahn - Night Train to Rigel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

an equally casual flick back down again. But there was something about it, or
about him, that sent a brief tingle across the back of my neck.
But it was nothing I could put my finger on, and he made no comment or move,
and I continued on back to my seat. Thirteen minutes later I heard a series of
faint thuds as the brakes were released. A few seconds after that, with a
small jolt, the train began moving forward. A rhythmic clicking began from
beneath me as the wheels hit the expansion gaps in the railing, a rhythm whose
tempo steadily increased as the
train picked up speed. My inner ear caught the slight upward slope as we left
the station area and angled up into the narrower part of the main Tube. A
moment later we leveled out again, and were on our way to Yandro. A total of
eight hundred twenty light-years, a nice little overnight train ride away.
.Which was, of course, the part that really drove the experts crazy. Nowhere
along our journey would the Quadrail ever top a hundred kilometers per hour
relative to the Tube itself. That much had been proved with accelerometers and
laser Doppler measurements off the Tube wall.
Yet when we pulled into Yandro Station some fourteen hours from now, we would
find that our speed relative to the rest of the galaxy had actually been
almost exactly one light-year per minute.
No one knew how it worked, not even the six races who claimed to have been
with the Quadrail since its inception seven hundred years ago. They couldn't
even agree on whether speeds in this strange hyperspace were accelerated or
whether it was the distances themselves that were somehow shortened.
In the past, I'd always thought the argument mostly a waste of effort. The
system worked, the Spiders kept it running on time, and up to now that was all
that had mattered.
But mat had been before everything that had happened at the New Pallas Towers
a week ago.
And, of course, before the Spiders had lost my carrybags. I could only hope
they'd ended up somewhere else aboard the train and that I would find them
waiting when I got off at Yandro.
Tilting my chair back, I pulled out my reader and one of the book chips from
my pocket. A little reading while everyone got settled, and then I would take
a trip through the rest of the third-class coaches to the second/third-class
dining car. There was a chance my unknown benefactor was aboard the train with
me, planning to make contact once we got off, and it would be a good idea to
run as many of the passengers as I could through my mental mug file.
But even as I started in on my book, I found my vision wavering. It had been a
long trip from Earth, and I was suddenly feeling very tired. A quick nap, I
decided, and I'd be in better shape to go wandering off memorizing faces.
Tucking my reader away, I set my watch alarm for an hour. With one final look
at the back of the Bellido's head, I snuggled back as best I could into my
seat and closed my eyes.
I awoke with a start, my head aching, my body heavy with the weight of too
much sleep, my skin tingling with the sense that something was wrong.
I kept my eyes shut, my ears straining for clues, my nose sifting the air for
odd scents, my face and hands alert for the telltale brush of a breeze that
would indicate someone or something was moving near me.
Nothing. So what was it that had set off my mental alarms?
And then, suddenly, I had it. The steady rhythm of the clacking rails beneath