"Hogan, James P - Voyage from Yesteryear" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

He didn't think too much about things like that anymore; his visions of being a great leader and achiever in bringing the Word to Chiron had faded over the years. And instead . . . what? Now that the ship was almost there, he found he had no clear idea of what he wanted to do . . . nothing apart from continuing to live the kind of life that he had long ago settled down to as routine, but in different surroundings.
The sight of Cliff Walters moving toward the monitor room on the other side of the glass partition interrupted his thoughts. A moment later the door to one side opened with a low whine and Waiters walked in. Fallows swung his chair round to face him and looked up in surprise. "Hi. You're early. Still forty minutes to go."
Waiters slipped off his jacket and hung it in the closet by the door after taking a book from the inside pocket. Fallows frowned but made no comment.
"Logging on early," Waiters replied. "Merrick wants to talk to you for a minute before you go off duty. He told me to tell you to stop by the ECD. You can take off now and see him on the company's time." He moved over to the console and nodded at the array of screens. "How are we doing? Lots of wild and exciting things happening?"
"Five-sub-three primary's starting to play up again, you'll be happy to hear. Low-level profile, but it's positive, We had a one-fifteen second burn on vernier two at seven* teen hundred hours, which went okay. The main burn is behaving itself fine and correcting for trim as programmed .... ' He shrugged. "That's about it."
Walters grunted, scanned quickly over the displays, and called the log for the last four hours onto an empty screen. "Looks like we're in for another strip down on that goddamn pump," he murmured without turning his head. "Looks like it," Fallows agreed with a sigh.
"Not worth screwing around with," Walters declared. "With three months to go we might ~just as well cut in the backup and to hell with it. Fix the thing after we get there, when the main drive's not running. Why lose pounds sweating in trog-suits?'
"Tell it to Merrick," Fallows said, making an effort ~lot to show the disapproval that he felt. Talking that way betrayed a sloppy attitude toward engineering. Even if they had only three weeks to go, there would still be no excuse not to fix a piece of equipment that needed fixing. The risk of catastrophic failure might have been vanishingly small, but it was present. Good practice lay with reducing possibilities like that to zero. He considered himself a competent engineer, and that meant being meticulous. Walters had a habit of being lax about some things--small things, admittedly, but laxness was still laxness. To be ranked equally irked Fallows. "Log change of watch duty, Horace," he said to the grille on the console. "Officer Fallows
standing down. Officer Waiters taking over." "Acknowledged," Horace replied.
Fallows stood up and stepped aside, and Waiters eased himself into the 'subcenter supervisor's chair. "You're off
on a forty-eight, that right?" Waiters asked. "Uh-huh." "Any plans?"
"Not really. Jay's playing on one of the teams in the Bowl tomorrow. I'll probably go and watch that. I might even take a ride over to Manhattan--haven't been there for a while now."
"Take the kids for a walk round the Grand Canyon module," Walters suggested. "It's being resculpted again-lots of trees and rocks, with plenty of water.! Should be pretty."
Fallows appeared surprised. "I thought it was closed off for another two days. Isn't the Army having an exercise in there or something?"
"They wound it up early. Anyhow, Bud told me it'll be open again tomorrow. Check it out and give it a try."
"I might just do that," Fallows said, nodding slowly. "Yeah .... I could use being out and about for a few hours. Thanks for the tip."
"Anytime. Take care."
Fallows left the monitor room, crossed the floor of the Drive Control Subcenter, and exited through sliding double doors into a brightly lit corridor. An elevator took him up two levels to another corridor, and minutes later he was being shown into an office that opened onto one side of the Engineering Command Deck. Inside, Leighton Merrick, the Assistant Deputy Director of Engineering, was contemplating something on one of the reference screens built into the panel angled across the left comer of the desk at which he was sitting.
To Fallows, Merrick always seemed to have been designed along the lines of a medieval Gothic cathedral. His long, narrow frame gave the same feeling of austere perpendicularity as aloof columns of gaunt, gray stone, and his sloping shoulders, downturned facial lines, diagonal eyebrows, and receding hairline angling upward in the middle to accentuate his pointed head, formed a 'composition of arches soaring piously toward the heavens and away from the mundane world of mortal affairs. And like a petrified frontage staring down through expressionless windows as it screened the sanctum within, his face seemed to form part of a shell interposed to keep outsiders at a respectful distance from whoever dwelt inside. Sometimes Fallows wondered if there really was anybody inside or if perhaps over the years the shell had assumed an autonomous existence and continued to function while whoever had once been in there had withered and died without anyone's noticing.
Despite having worked under him for several years, Fallows had never been able to master the art of feeling at ease in Merrick's presence. Displays of undue familiarity were hardly to be expected between echelon-six and echelon-four personnel, naturally, but even allowing for that, Fallows always found himself in acute discomfort within seconds of entering a room with Merrick in it, especially when nobody else was present. This time he wouldn't let it happen, he had resolved for the umpteenth time back in the corridor. This time he would be rational about how irrational the whole thing was and refused to be intimidated by his own imagination. Merrick had not singled him out as any special object of his disdain. He behaved that way with everybody. It didn't mean anything.
Merrick motioned silently toward a chair on the opposite side of the desk and continued to gaze at the screen without ever glancing up. Fallows sat. After some ten seconds he began feeling uncomfortable. What had he done wrong in the last few days? Had there been something he'd forgotten?... or failed to report, maybe?... or left with loose ends dangling? He racked his brains but couldn't think of anything. Finally, unnerved, Fallow managed to stammer, "Er .. you wanted to see me, sir."
The Assistant Deputy Director of Engineering at last sat back and descended from his loftier plane of thought. "Ah, yes, Fallows." He gestured toward the screen he had been studying. "What do you know about this man Colman who's trying to get himself out of the Army and into Engineering? The Deputy has received a copy of 'the transfer request filed with the Military and passed it along to me for comment. It seems that this Colman has given your name as a reference. What do you know about him?" The inclined chin and the narrowing of the Gothic eyebrows were asking silently why any self-respecting echelon-four engineering officer would associate with an infantry sergeant.
It took Fallows a moment or two to realize what had happened. Then he groaned inwardly as the circumstances came back to him.
"I, er.. . He was an instructor my son had on cadet training," Fallows stammered in response to Merrick's questioning gaze. "I met him at the end-of-course parade.. talked to him a bit. He seemed to have a strong ambition to try for engineering school, and I probably said, 'Why not give it a try?,' or something like that. I guess maybe he remembered my name."
"Mmmm. So you don't really know anything about his experience or aptitude. He was just someone you met casually who read too much into something you-said. Right?"
Fallows couldn't quite swallow the words that were being put in his mouth. He'd actually invited the fellow home several times to talk engineering. Colman had some fascinating ideas. He frowned and shook his head before he could stop himself. "Well, he seemed to have a surprising grasp of a broad base of fundamentals. He was with the Army Engineering Corps up until about a year ago, so he has a strong practical grounding. And he's studied extensively since we left Earth. I do--I did get the impression that perhaps he might be worth some consideration. But of course that's just an opinion."
"Worth considering for what? You're not saying he'd make an engineering officer, surely."
"Of course not! But one of the Tech grades maybe . . . Two or Three perhaps. Or maybe the graduate entry stream." -
"Hmph." Merrick waved a hand at the screen. "Doesn't have the academies. He'd need to do at least a year with kids half his age. We're not a social rehabilitation unit, you know."
"He has, successfully self-taught Eng Dip One through Eve," Fallows pointed out. Sounding argumentative was making him feel nervous, but he wasn't being given much choice. "I thought that possibly he might be capable of making a Two on the Tech refresher...'
Merrick glared across the desk suspiciously. Evidently he wasn't getting the answers he wanted. "His Army record isn't exactly the best one could wish for, you know. Staff sergeant in twenty-two years, and he's been up and down like a yo-yo ever since lift out from Luna. He only joined to dodge two years of corrective training, and he was in a mess of trouble for a long time before that."
"Well, I--I can't pretend to know anything about that side of things, sir."
"You do now." Merrick arched his fingers in front of his face. "Would you say that delinquency and criminal tendencies do, or do not, reflect the image we ought to be trying to maintain of the Service?"
Faced with a question slanted like that, Fallows could only reply, "Well... no, I suppose not."
"Aha" Merrick seemed more satisfied. "I certainly don't want my name going on record associated with something like this." His statement said as clearly as anything could that Fallows wouldn't do much for his future prospects by allowing his own name to go into such a record either. Merrick screwed his face up as if. he were experiencing a sour taste. "Low-echelon rabble trying to rise above themselves. We've got to keep them in; their places, you know, Fallows. That was what went wrong with the Old Order. It let them climb too high, and they took over. And what happened? They dragged it down-civilization. Do you want to see that happen again?"
"No, of course not," Fallows said, not very happily.'
"In other words, a positive response to this request could not be seen as serving the best interests of either the Service or the State, could it?" Merrick concluded.
Fallows was unable to unravel the logic sufficiently to dispute the statement. Instead, he shook his head. "It doesn't sound like it, I suppose."
Merrick nodded gravely. "An officer who abets an act contrary to the best interests of the Service is being disloyal, and a citizen who acts against the interests of the
State could be considered subversive, wouldn't you agree?" "Well, that's true, but--"
"So would you want to go on record as advocating a disloyal and subversive act?" Merrick challenged.
"Definitely not. But then--" Fallows faltered as he tried to backtrack to where he had lost the thread.
"Thank you," Merrick said, pouncing on the opportunity to conclude. "I agree with and endorse your assessment. Very good, Fallows. Enjoy your leave." Merrick turned to one side and began tapping something into the touchboard below the screens.
Fallows stood awkwardly and began moving toward the door. When he was halfway there he stopped, hesitated, then turned round again. "Sir, there's just one thing I'd like--"
"That's all, Fallows," Merrick murmured without looking up. "You are dismissed."

Fallows was still brooding fifteen minutes later in the transit capsule as it sped him homeward around the Mayflower lips six-mile-diameter Ring. Merrick was fight, he had decided. He had been a fool. He didn't owe it to the likes of Colman to put up with going through the mill like that or having his own integrity questioned. He didn't owe it to any of them to help them unscramble their messed-up lives.
Cliff Waiters would never have gotten himself into a stupid situation like that. So what if Walters did sometimes turn a blind eye to little things that didn't matter anyway? Walters was a lot smarter when it came to the things that did matter. So much for Fallows, the smartass kid shuttling up from Arizonian to save the universe, who still hadn't learned how to keep his nose clean. Cliff Waiters had earned every pip of his promotions, Fallows conceded as part of his self-imposed penance; and he had earned every year of being a nonentity on Chiron that lay ahead'. Someday, maybe, he'd learn to listen to Jean.

CHAPTER THREE