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

whole way. A trans-optical illusion, the
experts called it, a fancy way of saying they didn't have the foggiest idea
how it worked.
But then, as far as I knew, none of the other alien races who traveled the
Quadrail knew how it worked, either. The Spiders who ran the system were the
only ones in on the secret, and they weren't talking.
The station itself was an extra-wide spot in me Tube, five kilometers long and
two in diameter, with hatches of various sizes set in neat rows around its
surface. Current theory held that it had to be built wider than the rest of
the Tube in order to bring it more solidly into normal space. The more cynical
view was that the Spiders had to do something to justify the trillion-dollar
fee they charged to put a Quadrail station into a solar system.
Two of me smaller hatchways had passenger shuttles like ours already snugged
up to them, ready to pick up incoming passengers. Another ten or twelve of the
cargo hatches were similarly occupied, which meant there must be at least one
freight train arriving soon as well. Cargo was the true economic backbone of
the operation, of course, given that the Quadrail carried every gram of trade
that passed among the galaxy's thousands of inhabited star systems. Passenger
transport was nice to have, but in the larger scheme of things I suspected all
of us together barely registered as a footnote on the Spiders' balance sheet.
Our shuttle eased past a drifting maintenance skiff and zeroed in on a hatch
marked with bright lavender lights, rolling over to press its upper surface
against the alien metal. There was a click of lockseals, and the shuttle's
dorsal hatch slid open. Sensing the presence of air against it, the station's
hatch irised open in response, and the passengers unfastened their restraints
and floated their way into a civilized line at the ladder.
The information cards everyone received with their tickets emphasized the fact
that, unlike the transfer station's rotational pseudogravity or the
Shorshic-style vectored force thrusters that everyone else in the galaxy used,
the Tube's system of artificial gravity began right at the inner edge of
the entrance hatch. But there was always one idiot per shuttle who hadn't
bothered to read the directions. Ours was six people ahead of me, floating
with brisk confidence up alongside the ladder and then abruptly changing
direction as his head poked through the hatch and the Tube's gravity grabbed
him and shoved him straight back down again. On his next try, he made sure to
hang on to the ladder the whole way up like he was supposed to.
And a minute later, for the first time in over two years, I was standing
inside the greatest engineering feat the universe had ever known.
The station's general layout was prosaic enough, and aside from the fact that
it was built into the inside of a huge cylinder, it would have felt right at
home beside any Earth-bound train or monorail yard. There were thirty sets of
four-railed tracks spaced evenly around the surface, with groups of elegantly
designed buildings set between them that functioned as service centers,
maintenance facilities, restaurants, and waiting rooms for passengers
transferring between different lines.
Why four rails were needed per track was one more mystery in the Quadrail's
stack of unanswered questions. Two rails this size were required for physical
stability, and a third could be explained if power was being run to the trains
from an external source. But no one could figure out why the system needed a
fourth.