"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Endgame (english)" - читать интересную книгу автораof it, whoever's in charge. I just wonder; it's been
two hundred odd years back home; it'll have been another two centuries before we can get back, maybe longer, depending on where the Newbies lead us. I just wonder whether there's still anything left worth warning." I didn't know how much of the conversation Sears and Roebuck had heardЧlittle, I hoped. I stepped forward and spoke aloud, rousing the Newbie. "New- bies, attention please. Take us to yourЧto the rest of you, please. Can you do that?" It opened its eyes and spoke but did not otherwise move. "We can take you to us if we have not changed our plan for exploration. We are going to [unintelligi- ble], but we do not know where we will go from there." "If we leave now," Arlene whispered in my ear, "we'll still arrive about forty years after the Newbies arrived, no matter where it is." "Can you giveЧah, the Klave bearing and distance to your location?" The Newbie turned to Sears and Roebuck and spoke in a different language. And the latter re- sponded in the same tongue! Arlene and I stared at each other; when had the Newbie learned to speak mystery: "Learned it from the Freds, of course." It probably wasn't Klavish, actually, just some common language the two sides, the Hyperrealists and the Deconstructionists, used for interparty negotiation. Sears and Roebuck turned back to the local naviga- tional system. Evidently, in the absence of conflicting orders from any other section of the ship, any one station was sufficient to pilot the entire vessel. "Voy- age taking us another eight of weeks, it will," an- nounced the pair of Klave. "External times in the hundred and twenty of years." Eight more long weeks . . . God, just what I wanted. I took a deep breath. "Push the button, Max," I said. Arlene gave me a swift kick in the ankle. The lift sequence was bizarre. It took a full day, much of which was a carefully calculated refueling that the ship carried out automatically after Sears and Roebuck programmed the course. Arlene interrogated the Klave extensively on just how the launch itself worked, then briefed me, like a good junior NCO. On their homeworld, the Freds used something Arlene called a "pinwheel launcher," which she de- scribed as a huge asterisk in orbit around the planet. Each limb of the asterisk was a boom with a hook |
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