JК
Crashlander :: Нивен Ларри
Страница: 30 из 199Would you send —»
«Is one of your instruments malfunctioning, Beowulf Shaeffer?»
«No, they all work fine, as far as they go. Look —»
«Then what could you possibly have to say that would require my attention?»
«Honey, now is the time to decide. Do you want revenge, or do you want your ship back?»
A small silence. Then, «You may speak,»
«I can reach the Core much faster if I first get into one of the spaces between the arms. Do we know enough about the galaxy to know where our arm ends?»
«I will send to the Institute of Knowledge to find out.»
«Good.»
Four hours later I was dragged from a deathlike sleep by the ringing of the hyperphone. It was not the president but some flunky. I remembered calling the puppeteer «honey» last night, tricked by my own exhaustion and that seductive voice, and wondered if I'd hurt his puppeteer feelings. «He» might be a male; a puppeteer's sex is one of his little secrets. The flunky gave me a bearing and distance for the nearest gap between stars.
It took me another day to get there. When the stars began to thin out, I could hardly believe it. I turned off the hyperdrive, and it was true. The stars were tens and hundreds of light-years apart. I could see part of the Core peeking in a bright rim above the dim flat cloud of mixed dust and stars.
IV.
From then on it was better. I was safe if I glanced at the mass pointer every ten minutes or so. I could forget the rest breaks, eat meals, and do isometrics while watching the pointers. For eight hours a day I slept, but during the other sixteen I moved. The gap swept toward the Core in a narrowing curve, and I followed it.
As a voyage of exploration the trip would have been a fiasco. I saw nothing. I stayed well away from anything worth seeing. Stars and dust, anomalous wispy clusters shining in the dark of the gap, invisible indications that might have been stars — my cameras picked them up from a nice safe distance, showing tiny blobs of light. In three weeks I moved almost seventeen thousand light-years toward the Core.
The end of those three weeks was the end of the gap.
Before me was an uninteresting wash of stars backed by a wall of opaque dust clouds. I still had thirteen thousand light-years to go before I reached the center of the galaxy-I took some pictures and moved in.
Ten-minute breaks, mealtimes that grew longer and longer for the rest they gave, sleep periods that left my eyes red and burning. The stars were thick and the dust was thicker, so that the mass pointer showed a blur of blue broken by sharp blue lines. The lines began to get less sharp.
«Is one of your instruments malfunctioning, Beowulf Shaeffer?»
«No, they all work fine, as far as they go. Look —»
«Then what could you possibly have to say that would require my attention?»
«Honey, now is the time to decide. Do you want revenge, or do you want your ship back?»
A small silence. Then, «You may speak,»
«I can reach the Core much faster if I first get into one of the spaces between the arms. Do we know enough about the galaxy to know where our arm ends?»
«I will send to the Institute of Knowledge to find out.»
«Good.»
Four hours later I was dragged from a deathlike sleep by the ringing of the hyperphone. It was not the president but some flunky. I remembered calling the puppeteer «honey» last night, tricked by my own exhaustion and that seductive voice, and wondered if I'd hurt his puppeteer feelings. «He» might be a male; a puppeteer's sex is one of his little secrets. The flunky gave me a bearing and distance for the nearest gap between stars.
It took me another day to get there. When the stars began to thin out, I could hardly believe it. I turned off the hyperdrive, and it was true. The stars were tens and hundreds of light-years apart. I could see part of the Core peeking in a bright rim above the dim flat cloud of mixed dust and stars.
IV.
From then on it was better. I was safe if I glanced at the mass pointer every ten minutes or so. I could forget the rest breaks, eat meals, and do isometrics while watching the pointers. For eight hours a day I slept, but during the other sixteen I moved. The gap swept toward the Core in a narrowing curve, and I followed it.
As a voyage of exploration the trip would have been a fiasco. I saw nothing. I stayed well away from anything worth seeing. Stars and dust, anomalous wispy clusters shining in the dark of the gap, invisible indications that might have been stars — my cameras picked them up from a nice safe distance, showing tiny blobs of light. In three weeks I moved almost seventeen thousand light-years toward the Core.
The end of those three weeks was the end of the gap.
Before me was an uninteresting wash of stars backed by a wall of opaque dust clouds. I still had thirteen thousand light-years to go before I reached the center of the galaxy-I took some pictures and moved in.
Ten-minute breaks, mealtimes that grew longer and longer for the rest they gave, sleep periods that left my eyes red and burning. The stars were thick and the dust was thicker, so that the mass pointer showed a blur of blue broken by sharp blue lines. The lines began to get less sharp.