The Seeds of Time
- Автор: Уиндем Джон Паркс Лукас Бейнон Харрис
- Язык: английский
- Год: Michael Joseph
- ISBN: 0-7181-0362-9
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «The Seeds of Time». Краткое содержание книги:
He was well enough aware of the general opinion about it to refrain from adding a sharp retort to Wishart. Instead, he conceded:
‘Maybe it’d not do to take a real woman to a place like that. But a Mart’s kind of different…’
‘Even a Mart ‘ Wishart began, but he was cut short by finding himself drift slowly across the room as the arrester tubes began to fire.
Conversation ceased as everybody turned-to on the job of securing all loose objects.
Jupiter IV/II was, by definition, a sub-moon, and probably a captured asteroid. The surface was not cratered, like Luna’s: it was simply a waste of jagged, riven rocks. The satellite as a whole had the form of an irregular ovoid; it was a bleak, cheerless lump of stone splintered off some vanished planet, with nothing whatever to commend it but its situation.
There have to be way-load stations. It would be hopelessly uneconomic to build big ships capable of landing on the major planets. A few of the older and smaller ships were indeed built on Earth, and so had to be launched from there, but the very first large, moon-assembled ship established a new practice. Ships became truly spaceships and were no longer built to stand the strains of high gravitational pull.
They began to make their voyages, carrying fuel, stores, freight, and changes of personnel, exclusively between satellites. Newer types do not put in even at Luna, but use the artificial satellite, Pseudos, exclusively as their Earth terminus.
Freight between the way-loads and their primaries is customarily consigned in powered cylinders known as crates; passengers are ferried back and forth in small rocketships. Stations such as Pseudos, or Deimos, the main way-load for Mars, handle enough work to keep a crew busy, but in the outlying, little developed posts one man who is part-handler, part-watchman is enough. Ships visited them infrequently. On Jupiter IV/II one might, according to Duncan’s information, expect an average of one every eight or nine months (Earth).
The ship continued to slow, coming in on a spiral, adjusting her speed to that of the satellite. The gyros started up to give stability. The small, jagged world grew until it overflowed the watch-screens. The ship was manoeuvred into a close orbit. Miles of featureless, formidable rocks slid monotonously beneath her.
The station site came sliding on to the screen from the left; a roughly levelled area of a few acres; the first and only sign of order in the stony chaos. At the far end was a pair of hemispherical huts, one much larger than the other. At the near end, a few cylindrical crates were lined up beside a launching ramp hewn from the rock. Down each side of the area stood rows of canvas bins, some stuffed full of a conical shape; others slack, empty or half-empty. A huge parabolic mirror was perched on a crag behind the station, looking like a monstrous, formalized flower. In the whole scene there was only one sign of movement-a small, spacesuited figure prancing madly about on a metal apron in front of the larger dome, waving its arms in a wild welcome.
Duncan left the screen, and went to the cabin. He found Lellie fighting off a large case which, under the influence of deceleration, seemed determined to pin her against the wall. He shoved the case aside, and pulled her out.
‘We’re there,’ he told her. ‘Put on your spacesuit.’
Her round eyes ceased to pay attention to the case, and turned towards him. There was no telling from them how she felt, what she thought. She said, simply:
‘Thpace-thuit. Yith-okay.’
Standing in the airlock of the dome, the outgoing Superintendent paid more attention to Lellie than to the pressuredial.
He knew from experience exactly how long equalizing took, and opened his faceplate without even a glance at the pointer.
‘Wish I’d had the sense to bring one,’ he observed. ‘Could have been mighty useful on the chores, too.’
He opened the inner door, and led through.
‘Here it is-and welcome to it,’ he said.
The main living-room was oddly shaped by reason of the dome’s architecture, but it was spacious. It was also exceedingly, sordidly untidy.
‘Meant to clean it up-never got around to it, some way,’ he added. He looked at Lellie. There was no visible sign of what she thought of the place. ‘Never can tell with Marts,’ he said uneasily. ‘They kind of non-register.’
Duncan agreed: ‘I’ve figured this one looked astonished at being born, and never got over it.’
The other man went on looking at Lellie. His eyes strayed from her to a gallery of pinned-up terrestrial beauties, and back again.
‘Sort of funny shape Marts are,’ he said, musingly.
‘This one’s reckoned a good enough looker where she comes from,’ Duncan told him, a trifle shortly.
‘Sure. No offence, Bud. I guess they’ll all seem a funny shape to me after this spell.’ He changed the subject. ‘I’d better show you the ropes around here.’
Duncan signed to Lellie to open her faceplate so that she could hear him, and then told her to get out of her suit.
The dome was the usual type: double-floored, double-walled, with an insulated and evacuated space between the two; constructed as a unit, and held down by metal bars let into the rock. In the living-quarters there were three more sizable rooms, able to cope with increased personnel if trade should expand.
‘The rest,’ the outgoing man explained, ‘is the regular station stores, mostly food, air cylinders, spares of one kind and another, and water-you’ll need to watch her on water; most women seem to think it grows naturally in pipes.’
Duncan shook his head.
‘Not Marts. Living in deserts gives ‘em a natural respect for water.’
The other picked up a clip of store-sheets.
‘We’ll check and sign these later. It’s a nice soft job here. Only freight now is rare metalliferous earths. Callisto’s not been opened up a lot yet. Handling’s easy. They tell you when a crate’s on the way: you switch on the radio beacon to bring it in. On dispatch you can’t go wrong if you follow the tables.’ He looked around the room. ‘All home comforts. You read? Plenty of books.’ He waved a hand at the packed rows which covered half the inner partition wall. Duncan said he’d never been much of a reader. ‘Well, it helps,’ said the other. ‘Find pretty well anything that’s known in that lot. Records there. Fond of music?’
Duncan said he liked a good tune.
‘H’m. Better try the other stuff. Tunes get to squirrelling inside your head. Play chess?’ He pointed to a board, with men pegged into it.
Duncan shook his head.
‘Pity. There’s a fellow over on Callisto plays a pretty hot game. He’ll be disappointed not to finish this one. Still, if I was fixed up the way you are, maybe I’d not have been interested in chess.’ His eyes strayed to Lellie again. ‘What do you reckon she’s going to do here, over and above cooking and amusing you?’ he asked.
It was not a question that had occurred to Duncan, but he shrugged.
‘Oh, she’ll be okay, I guess. There’s a natural dumbness about Marts-they’ll sit for hours on end, doing damn all. It’s a gift they got.’
‘Well, it should come in handy here,’ said the other.
The regular ship’s-call work went on. Cases were unloaded, the metalliferous earths hosed from the bins into the holds. A small ferryrocket came up from Callisto carrying a couple of time-expired prospectors, and left again with their two replacements. The ship’s engineers checked over the station’s machinery, made renewals, topped up the water tanks, charged the spent air cylinders, tested, tinkered, and tested again before giving their final okay.