"Chalker, Jack L - Quintara 1 - The Demons at Rainbow Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)
Lankur's protective blister vanished first, and he was immediately all action. "Computer! Damage report!"
"Bad hole in the aft starboard hold," the computer responded through the speakers. "Some damage to redundancy systems but the mains held all right. Everything loose went flying, though. Ship and all hands are safe and secure, but the place is a real mess from bow to stern."
"Screw the mess! What happened?"
The others were all released now as well, and bending and rubbing and stretching to release the sudden tension. Modra Stryke got to a waste hole and threw up. Jimmy McCray wanted to, but there wasn't much in his throat except bile. He suspected, although he wasn't too sure yet, that he'd wet his pants.
< They never had that one in flight recertification simulations1^ Grysta commented, sounding about as unsteady as the rest of them looked.
"The singularity threw off what can only be described as a spray of panicles along a two hundred and four degree arc, impossible to dodge completely," the computer was reporting. "The largest I measured was about five centimeters in diameter, but they were so dense that they were in effect pure gravitons packed as tight as possible. The speed approached light and they took us along for a while, until their spread weakened their collective pull sufficiently for us to break free. I diverted all power to that purpose. The duration of the uncontested pull was one point two five five seconds during which we moved two hundred ninety-seven point three four six zero kilometers. Breakaway took another six seconds, braking another twelve, during which we moved another three hundred and fourteen kilometers, rounded off."
"Wait a minute!" Jimmy McCray commented as soon as he could talk without spitting bile. "You're telling me that we moved nearly a light-year in one second, in normal space, under the normal rules, and that from a standstill, we're now better than two light-years away from where we were?"
"More or less," the computer agreed. "That's why things are a mess all over the ship. We might have some temporal dislocation as well, although it is difficult to determine right now. It will take me a little while to effect basic repairs and calculate a return using more conventional power. After that I shall endeavor to contact universal beacons by subspace tightbeam and determine just what temporal dislocations, if any, it caused. I am also running a stress analysis on every joint and plate in this ship to make certain that damage which is not obvious doesn't cause unpleasantries later. You can be proud of this ship. We are not designed to take beatings like that one. I have run the data we dealt with through the simulation loop a few million times and almost every time it comes back that we are destroyed and you are all dead."
That put a damper on conversation for a minute or so.
Finally the computer asked, "Do you wish me to get us back to the I.P.?"
"Of course," Lankur responded. "Why wouldn't we?"
"Well, considering the simulations, I should say that if we go back and something like this happens again, there is virtually no chance that this ship could hold together a second time, particularly in its weakened condition."
Lankur nodded, then looked at the others one by one. Finally Jimmy shrugged and said, "We knew the job was dangerous when we took it."
"All right, then." Lankur sighed. "That seems to be the prevailing sentiment. Get us back when you can."
Suddenly Jimmy McCray jumped to his feet. "Molly!" I'd better see to her! She's probably terrified out of her wits! I'm getting the oddest thought-streams from her." Odd wasn't the word for it. It was a mixture of the aftermath of sheer terror and . . . something else not so easily defined.
He went out of the wardroom, raced down to the cabin they shared, and poked his head in. She was there, all right, but she didn't look terrified and she actually gave him a smile.
"Are you all right?" he asked her, concerned.
"Oh, yeah. Hey, that be near! Was most fun I had in long time. We gonna do that again?"
For a moment he was speechless. She thinks this is some sort of bloody amusement ride! Then he said, slowly, controlling himself as best he could, "I certainly hope not."
Modra Stryke was more human than she'd been at any time since they'd set out on the expedition. Jimmy McCray understood that, for the first time, she was less administrator than active participant, and this gave her some reason to be there and to get her mind off her own dark thoughts.
She wanted this one, wanted it more than she'd wanted success in anything, because, as her thoughts told Jimmy, it would be her last hurrah. There was no question that she was no longer fit for this sort of thing, and she knew it. To have this one end in failure might be more than her fragile sanity could bear.
In a sense, empaths and telepaths were very similar, only reading different things. The brain was highly complex, and it used a number of organic mechanisms to do what it did. The analogue was to a tiny closed-circuit transmitter that brought all the elements of thought to the forebrain for assembly and coherent interpretation, much as a computer would assemble the elements in its memory within its central processing unit and then transmit them to an output device. The amount of energy involved in the organic system was minuscule, but just as radio telescopes could zero in on, scoop up, isolate, and define noises so faint that they were beyond any concept of normal hearing, so, too, a telepath could pick up, isolate, and intercept those broadcasts on the primary band, the one of primary thought itself. The daydreams, the secondary thoughts, were far too weak and could never be separated from the background, but the main forward-thinking could.
But other information rode on that primary band; sidebands of supplemental data that even the best telepath could not receive but only interpolate, sometimes wrongly, from the strength and context of the thoughts. The emotion behind and beneath the thought, the feelings of the transmitter, were one such sideband, and it was this that the empath could read by somehow also suppressing background and isolating it.
Because of the total isolation of the blister, Modra's comments would be smothered, but Jimmy McCray could penetrate it without disturbing either her or the instrumentation, now set entirely to the empathic band.
< Waves and waves of feelings; massive concentrations ... a living planet. Impossible to believe, impossible to ignore. Identical sensations to scanning any large, inhabited body . . . No question. Something's down there. . . . A lot of somethings are down there. I wonder what they look like? I wonder if they look like anything at all? Pure energy, perhaps, held together in some kind of plasma beyond our ability to see, hear, or understand, perhaps . . . Fixed-form energy, duplicating without matter the kind of matter-energy synergy that our brains use . . . Pure mind, no body at all. . . But shape. Some kind of shape, since they're distinct. A mind of pure energy in an energy container ... Living transmitters and receivers as well, seeing and hearing by broadcast waves and returns . . . Returns too confusing. Have to go in, isolate. . . . >
"She's going in close," Jimmy told them. "She's getting the same sort of thing I did on wide scan, though. From what she's getting, I can pretty well say everybody was right from the start, anyway. They're there."
< Isolating . . . Odd feelings . . . > She shivered. < Strange feelings . . . What can they mean? No sense of deception, deceit . . . Whatever they are, they're honest and open with each other. . . If all your interactions are by telepathy, empathy, and who knows what bands we might not be able to tap, it would be ... No traces of envy, greed, jealousy . . . A race with none of the seven deadly sins. If it wasn't for their awful environment, the place would be more boring than heaven. . . . That's a thought. Maybe I'm being too normal here. Maybe I'm mentally filtering the wrong things. . . . >
Jimmy McCray sighed. "What she's getting definitely proves they have nothing in common with us predators. You wonder why a species that never has to lie, cheat, steal, or make war needs intelligence at all."
"Perhaps they have simply outgrown it," suggested Tris Lankur.
"Or more likely outlived and defeated it," responded the Durquist cynically. "I refuse to surrender all my preconceptions."
"She's wandering, brooding," Jimmy warned them. "I wouldn't exactly say she's lost her nerve, but she's lost her self-confidence. I hate to say it, but even though we might be on the right track, I don't think she's up to it mentally and she knows it. She's in a brood loop and it's shutting out the whole bloody planet."
Tris Lankur sighed. "All right, then, bring her out. We'll just have to think of another angle somehow. She's the only empath weVe got."
At that moment, Molly stepped onto the crew bridge. She didn't usually come up, particularly when somebody was working, but McCray could see she'd gotten bored and started feeling lonely. "What'cha doin'?" she asked pleasantly.
Suddenly all eyes turned to her, and Jimmy McCray got all their thoughts at once -- an easy task since they were all nearly the same thought.
"Naw, forget it," he told them. "She's got about the mind of a five-year-old."
"Perhaps that's not as much of a disqualification for this kind of work as it sounds," Lankur responded thoughtfully.
"Indeed," the Durquist put in. "She wouldn't spend half her energy intellectualizing why they're impossible or too alien or whatever, or get hung up with her own problems. It would be wonderfully ironic if what was standing in the way of us and our machines was our knowledge and our intellects."
It was decided that a tiny transmitter through which Jimmy's familiar voice could whisper instructions and encouragement was warranted here, in spite of the theoretical distraction it would represent. Molly was never good at doing more than one thing at a time anyway, and she was eager to find out what the machine with the neat chair did, as long as it didn't hurt and somebody told her what to do.
It was a simple matter for Trannon Kose to hook up a small remote to the controls; it not only simplified the job of teaching her how to work the thing, it gave Jimmy some added control and a sure hand at the stick.
"What I do now, Jimmy?"
"Don't talk, just think your questions," he told her. "The-wrapping -- makes it useless to speak out loud, but I can always hear you. All you have to do right now is relax and let the pictures come into your mind. Yes -- that's good. Now . . . what do you see in your head?"
< Sun. Same one as on big picture screen. Look real hot. >
"It is. Now, you know how you know the way men are feeling by just looking at them? Just relax and do the same for that sun."
Puzzlement. Confusion.
"Shut up, Grysta," he hissed, even though she echoed his thoughts. No matter what, it was too early to give up; they had to at least try.
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