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

without newspapers, department stores, new film plays, new faces, or even the
relieving annoyances of changeable weather. The sheer completeness of all
preparations for the voyage made the voyage itself uneventful. That meant
tedium.
Tedium meant restlessness. And restlessness, with women on board who had
envisioned high adventure, meant the devil to pay. Their husbands no longer
appeared as glamorous heroes. They were merely human beings. The men
encountered similar disillusioninents. Pleas for divorce flooded the
commander’s desk, he being legally the fount of all legal action. During the-
eighth month there was one murder, and in the three months following, two
more.
A year and a half out from Earth, and the crew was in a state of semi-
mutiny originating in sheer boredom. By two years out, the oflicers’ quarters
were sealed off from the greater part of the Adastra’s interior, the crew was
disarmed, and what work was demanded of the mutineers was enforced by force
guns in the hands of the officers. By three years out, the crew was demanding
a return to Earth. But by the time the Adastra could he slowed and stopped
from her then incredible velocity. she would be so near her destination as to
make no appreciable difference in the length of her total voyage. For the rest
of the time the members of the crew strove to relieve utter monotony by such
vices and such pastimes as could be improvised in the absence of any actual
need to work.
The officers’ quarters referred to the underlings by a term become
habitual, a contraction of the word "multineers.” The crew came to have a
queer distaste for all dealing with the officers. But, despite Alstair, there
was no longer much danger of an uprising. A certain mental equilibrium had—
very late—developed.
From the nerve-racked psycholgy of dwellers in an isolated apartment
house, the greater number of the Adastra’s complement came to have the
psychology of dwellers in an isolated village. The difference was profound. In
particular the children who had come to maturity during the long journey
through space were well adjusted to the conditions of isolation and of
routine.
Jack Gary was one of them. He had been sixteen when the trip began, son
of a rocket-tube engineer whose death took place the second year out. Helen
Bradley was another. She had been fourteen when her father, as designer and
commanding officer of the mighty globe, pressed the control key that set the
huge rockets into action.
Her father had been past maturity at the beginning. Aged by
responsibility for seven uninterrupted years, he was an old man now. And he
knew, and even Helen k±iew without admitting it, that he would never survive
the long trip back. Aistair would take his place and the despotic authority
inherent in it, and he wanted to marry Helen...
She thought of these things, with her chin cupped in her hand, brooding
in the control room. There was no sound save the humming of the ventilator and
the infrequent smug click of a relay operating the automatic machinery to keep
the Adastra a world in which nothing ever happened. A knock on the door. The
commander opened his eyes a trifle vaguely. He was very old now, the
commander. He had dozed.
Aistair said shortly, “Come in!” and Jack Gary entered.