"Murray Leinster - Proxima Centauri" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

Earth was seven years behind and uncounted millions of billions of
miles. Interplanetary travel was a commonplace in the solar system now, and a
thriving colony on Venus and a precariously maintained outpost on the largest
of Jupiter’s moons promised to make space commerce thrive even after the dead
cities of Mars had ceased to give up their incredibly rich loot. But only the
Adastra had ever essayed space beyond Pluto.
She was the greatest of ships, the most colossal structure ever
attempted by men. In the beginning, indeed, her design was derided as
impossible of achievement by the very men who later made her building a fact.
Her framework beams were so huge that, once cast, they could not be moved by
any lifting contrivance at her builders’ disposal. Therefore the molds for
them were built and the metal poured in their final position as a part of the
ship. Her rocket tubes were so colossal that the necessary supersonic
vibrations-to neutralize the disintegration effect of the Caidwell field—had
to be generated at thirty separate points on each tube, else the
disintegration of her fuel would have spread to the tubes themselves and the
big ship afterward, with even the mother planet following in a burst of
lambent purple flame. At full acceleration a set of twelve tubes disintegrated
five cubic centimeters of water per second.
Her diameter was a shade over five thousand feet. Her air tanks carried
a reserve supply which could run her crew of three hundred for ten months
without purification. Her stores, her shops, her supplies of raw and finished
materials, were in such vast quantities that to enumerate them would be merely
to recite meaningless figures.
There were even four hundred acres of food-growing space within her,
where crops were grown under sun lamps. Those, crops used waste organic matter
as fertilizer and restored exhaled carbon dioxide to use, in part as oxygen
and in part as carbohydrate footstuffs.
The Adastra was a world in herself. Given power, she could subsist her
crew forever, growing her food supplies, purifying her own internal atmosphere
without loss and without fail, and containing space within which every human
need could be provided, even solitude.
And starting out upon the most stupendous journey in human history, she
had formally been given the status of a world, with her commander empowered to
make and enforce all needed laws. Bound for a destination four light-years
distant, the minimum time for her return was considered to be fourteen years.
No crew could possibly survive so long a voyage undecimated. Therefore the
enlistments for the voyage had not been by men, but by families.
There were fifty children on board when the Adastra lifted from Earth’s
surface. In the first year of her voyage ten more were born. It had seemed to
the people of Earth that not only couid the mighty ship subsist her crew
forever, but that the crew itself, well-nourished and with more than adequate
facilities both for amusement and education, could so far perpetuate itself as
to make a voyage of a thousand years as practicable as the mere journey to
Proxima Centauri.
And so it could, but for a fact at once so needless and so human that
nobody anticipated it. The fact was tedium. In less than six months the
journey had ceased to become a great adventure. To the women in particular,
the voyage of the big ship became deadly routine.
The Adastra itself took on the semblance of a gigantic apartment house