"Zach Hughes - Mother Lode" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

until the huge generator's charge was depleted. The little ship hurled itself
down the star lanes toward the fiery heart of the galaxy.

There came a time when the blinks were shorter, when the course
became a zigzag made necessary by the density of the stellar population.
Actual travel was instantaneous, but preparation for that travel began to
take more and more time so that weeks became months.

She had leisure during the charging periods for exploring the contents
of the library, and for getting to know her companion. "You are, sir," she
said, as Moppy offered his right paw for shaking, "a rather remarkable
fellow. You don't snore. You don't take up much of the bed. You know that
your duty is to keep my feet warm at night and that all you're expected to
do during the day is guard against boogers and to get a smile on your face
and keep your big mouth shut. Men could learn a lot from you."

Moppy rolled over and said, "Uhhhhh," which was his way of saying,
"That's nice, Erin. Rub my stomach."

She was quite rapidly running out of charts. Winds of radiation swept
past Mother as she floated in the hard, hard light of the crowded star
fields. After each jump she was reminded of the difference between the
Century Series of computers and the state-of-the art Unicloud aboard
Rimfire. With millions of points of reference the old Century chuckled to
itself for minutes before confirming position. There were times when Erin
was tempted to cut the process short. She was, after all, still on established
blink routes. However, from her first year at the Academy she had been
taught to check and double-check. There was only one recorded case of it
happening, but if some natural force, say the gravitational pull of an
errant comet, had moved a blink beacon a substantial distance from its
surveyed location, a ship using the coordinates of the beacon on which to
base a blink might end up inside the atomic furnace of a star or become
blended atom to atom with some small, dark body.

As she moved ever deeper toward the star-packed core she began to
develop a claustrophobic feeling of being hemmed in by stars: orange
stars, red stars, blue-white stars; M stars and K stars; visual binaries and
eclipsing binaries; variable stars—Cepheids and RR Lyrae stars, SS Cygni
stars and R Corona Borealis stars; large stars and medium stars and blue
giants and old, tired, dark, shrunken stars dead by nova in a time so
remote that it was meaningless to a mere woman of New Earth who had
the life expectancy promised to the men of Old Earth in the one surviving
piece of Old Earth literature, the Bible. "The life span of man shall be a
hundred and twenty years." Genesis 6:3.

She was just over one-quarter through her allotted time, if, indeed, she
proved to be average; but as she jumped Mother carefully toward a dense
cluster of New York type stars it seemed that time had slowed, that she
would use up too much of her ration of years before Mother reached her
destination.