JК
Crashlander :: Нивен Ларри
Страница: 24 из 199The last and only time I took a job from a puppeteer, the puppeteer blackmailed me into it, knowing it would probably kill me. It almost did. I didn't hold that against the regional president of We Made It, but to let them have another crack at me — «I'll give you a conditional maybe. Do you have the idea I'm a professional suicide pilot?»
«Not at all. If I show details, do you agree that the information shall be confidential?»
«I do,» I said formally, knowing it would commit me. A verbal contract is as binding as the tape it's recorded on.
«Good. Come.» He pranced toward a transfer booth.
The transfer booth let us out somewhere in Jinx's vacuum regions. It was night. High in the sky, Sirius B was a painfully bright pinpoint casting vivid blue moonlight on a ragged lunar landscape. I looked up and didn't see Binary, Jinx's bloated orange companion planet, so we must have been in the Farside End.
But there was something hanging over us.
A No. 4 General Products hull is a transparent sphere a thousand-odd feet in diameter. No bigger ship has been built anywhere in the known galaxy. It takes a government to buy one, and they are used for colonization projects only. But this one could never have been so used; it was all machinery. Our transfer booth stood between two of the landing legs, so that the swelling flank of the ship looked down on us as an owl looks down at a mouse. An access tube ran through vacuum from the booth to the air lock.
I said, «Does General Products build complete spacecraft nowadays?»
«We are thinking of branching out. But there are problems.»
From the viewpoint of the puppeteer-owned company, it must have seemed high time. General Products makes the hulls for ninety-five percent of all ships in space, mainly because nobody else knows how to build an indestructible hull. But they'd made a bad start with this ship. The only room I could see for crew, cargo, or passengers was a few cubic yards of empty space right at the bottom, just above the air lock and just big enough for a pilot.
«You'd have a hard time selling that,» I said.
«True. Do you notice anything else?»
«Well …» The hardware that filled the transparent hull was very tightly packed. The effect was as if a race of ten-mile-tall giants had striven to achieve miniaturization. I saw no sign of access tubes; hence, there could be no in-space repairs. Four reaction motors poked their appropriately huge nostrils through the hull, angled outward from the bottom. No small attitude jets; hence, oversized gyros inside.
«Not at all. If I show details, do you agree that the information shall be confidential?»
«I do,» I said formally, knowing it would commit me. A verbal contract is as binding as the tape it's recorded on.
«Good. Come.» He pranced toward a transfer booth.
The transfer booth let us out somewhere in Jinx's vacuum regions. It was night. High in the sky, Sirius B was a painfully bright pinpoint casting vivid blue moonlight on a ragged lunar landscape. I looked up and didn't see Binary, Jinx's bloated orange companion planet, so we must have been in the Farside End.
But there was something hanging over us.
A No. 4 General Products hull is a transparent sphere a thousand-odd feet in diameter. No bigger ship has been built anywhere in the known galaxy. It takes a government to buy one, and they are used for colonization projects only. But this one could never have been so used; it was all machinery. Our transfer booth stood between two of the landing legs, so that the swelling flank of the ship looked down on us as an owl looks down at a mouse. An access tube ran through vacuum from the booth to the air lock.
I said, «Does General Products build complete spacecraft nowadays?»
«We are thinking of branching out. But there are problems.»
From the viewpoint of the puppeteer-owned company, it must have seemed high time. General Products makes the hulls for ninety-five percent of all ships in space, mainly because nobody else knows how to build an indestructible hull. But they'd made a bad start with this ship. The only room I could see for crew, cargo, or passengers was a few cubic yards of empty space right at the bottom, just above the air lock and just big enough for a pilot.
«You'd have a hard time selling that,» I said.
«True. Do you notice anything else?»
«Well …» The hardware that filled the transparent hull was very tightly packed. The effect was as if a race of ten-mile-tall giants had striven to achieve miniaturization. I saw no sign of access tubes; hence, there could be no in-space repairs. Four reaction motors poked their appropriately huge nostrils through the hull, angled outward from the bottom. No small attitude jets; hence, oversized gyros inside.