"Haldeman, Joe - Tricentennial" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

"Somebody from a Russian May Day committee is on the phone. She wants to know whether they've changed the name of the ship to Brezhnev yet."

"Yeah. Tell her we decided on `Leon Trotsky' instead, though."

He nodded seriously. "'Okay." He started to close the door.

"Wait! Charlie rubbed his eyes. "Tell her, uh . . . the ship doesn't have a commemorative name while it's in orbit there. They'll rechristen it just before the start of the return trip."

"Is that true?" Johnny asked.

"I don't know. Who cares? In another couple of months they won't want it named after anybody." He and Ab had worked out a plan admittedly rather shaky-to protect L-5 from the groundhogs' wrath: nobody on the satellite knew ahead of time that the ship was headed for 61 Cygni. It was a decision the crew arrived at on the way to Scylla Charybdis; they modified the drive, system to accept matter-antimatter destruction while they were orbiting the double star. L-5 would first hear of the mutinous plan via a transmission sent as Daedalus left Scylla/Charybdis. They'd be a .month on their way by the time the message got to Earth.

It was pretty transparent, but at least they had been careful that no record of Daedalus' true mission be left on L-5. Three thousand people did know the truth,

though, and any competent engineer or physical scientist would suspect it.

Ab had felt that, although there was a better than even chance they would be exposed, surely the groundhogs couldn't stay angry for 23 years-even if they were unimpressed by the antimatter and other wonders ....

Besides, Charlie thought, it's not their worry anymore.

As it turned out, the crew of Daedalus would have bigger things to worry about.

June 2077

The Russians had their May Day celebration-Charlie watched it on TV and winced every time they mentioned the good ship Leonid 1. Brezhnev-and then things settled back down to normal. Charlie and three thousand others waited nervously for the "surprise" message. It came in early June, as expected, scrambled in a data channel. But it didn't say what it was supposed to:

"This is Abigail Bemis, to Charles Leventhal.

"Charlie, we have real trouble. The ship has been damaged, hit in the stern by a good chunk of something. It punched right through the main drive reflector. Destroyed a set of control sensors and one attitude jet.

"As far as we can tell, the situation is stable. We're maintaining acceleration at just a tiny fraction under one gee. But we can't steer, and we can't shut o$ the main drive.

"We didn't have any trouble with ring debris when we were orbiting since we were inside Roche's limit. Coming in, as you know, we'd managed to take advantage of natural divisions in the rings. We tried the same going back, but it was a slower, more complicated process, since we mass so goddamn much now. We must have picked up a piece from the fringe of one of the outer rings.

"If we could turn obi the drive, we might have a chance at fixing it. But the work pods can't keep up
with the ship, not at one gee. The radiation down there would fry the operator in seconds, anyway.

"We're working on it. If you have any ideas, let us know. It occurs to me that this puts you in the clearwe were headed back to Earth, but got clobbered. Will send a transmission to that effect on the regular comm channel. This message is strictly burn-before reading.

"End it."

It worked perfectly, as far as getting Charlie and L-5 off the hook and the drama of the situation precipitated a level of interest in space travel unheard-of since the 1960's.

They even had a hero. A volunteer had gone down in a heavily shielded work pod, lowered on a cable, to take a look at the situation. She'd sent back clear pictures of the damage, before the cable snapped

Daedalus: A.D. 2081
Earth: A.D. 2101

The following news item was killed from Fax & Pix, because it was too hard to translate into the "plain English" that made the paper so popular: