"C. Sanford Lowe & G. David Nordley - The Small Pond" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lowe C Sanford)

“Are you busy for dinner?” she asked.
“What about lunch?” he countered, delighted by her attention. “It is almost
lunchtime now.”
She laughed. He was as eager as she was. But she had an engagement. “The
captain offered to show me his collection of ancient navigation equipment. He’s
going to establish a small museum at the Minot Space Colony around Campbell. I’ll
be in his quarters for lunch.”
“Well, dinner then?”
Liz allowed herself a slight smile. She had to be a decade older than him, even
subtracting the years she’d spent in cold sleep. Was he looking forward to more
than just dinner? The prospect was not entirely unpleasant. “Okay,” she smiled.
“1900 in Sphere One.”
Liz touched the net for a map. The Singer’s habitable parts consisted of six
spheres spaced hexagonally, like beads on a stiff hoop, around the magnetic field
generation cable. Between spheres, sections of a torus enclosed the wire and a
passageway. The ship spun about the hoop axis for stability under thrust along that
axis and for centrifugal gravity. The heavier lower half of each sphere rotated on the
hoop to keep its floors level under any combination of acceleration and spin. The
diagram showed the floors parallel to the spin axis, as they were now with no axial
thrust. She was now in Sphere Three, with most of the other passengers. Sphere
One, two spheres antispinward, was crew country.
“Captain’s table, then?”
Liz nodded. Let him think he has competition.
****
Liz looked forward to seeing the old hardware and was a little early to Captain
DeRoot’s quarters. On the way, she passed a woman who looked upset and gave
Liz the strangest look imaginable, but said nothing and hurried down the access tube.
Judi Lalande, the AI identified.
Each sphere had four decks and a mess. By tradition, Room 131 on deck
three of Sphere One was the captain’s quarters in all ships of this design. In her
voyage to Earth as a teenager, she’d never come close to Room 131; Captain Yuri
Ivanov had been a serious, forbidding figure who smiled at girls maybe twice in a
voyage. Remembering that sense of forbidden territory came back to her now. Liz
had captained her own exploration craft in the Solar System, but here in this moment
on the Singer, she was an excited child again.
The captain’s door slid silently open as she approached. He was at his desk,
seated with his back to the door. Overhead was a set of shelves holding various
pieces of metal equipment with dials, buttons, brass tubes, and lenses that all looked
strange to her. The room itself was no bigger than her own.
“Come in, come in,” he said, almost as if irritated. Then he turned and smiled.
“Peter DeRoot, and you are the redoubtable Elizabeth Avonford?”
She nodded.
 Instead of rising to shake her hand, he pulled a brass tube from his desk and
offered it to her. “It’s a telescope made five hundred years ago or so. A whaling
ship captain out of Lisboa, Portugal, used it in the early eighteen hundreds. Go
ahead, pull it out.”
She grabbed the end of the tube and pulled; it slid easily out to a length of
about half a meter.
“Does it work?”
Captain DeRoot got up and motioned toward the side of his cabin. An