"Chad Oliver - The Winds of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oliver Chad)

Partly it was Seyehi: not much to look at, unobtrusive, he blended with the equipment in the room.
More precisely, he was an extension of the computers he ran. The others called him Feedback, and he
always smiled at the name, as though it were a compliment. He knew his machines, and he lived with
them, and it might have been true to say that he loved them.
But mostly it was Wyik.
Wyik was the Captain to all of them; it was impossible to think of him as anything else. He must have
had a life before he went into space, before he began the search that he pursued with a granite hardness
that none of the others could match. He must have been born, been raised in a family, lived, laughed,
loved. He must have had such a life, but none of them had ever seen it. This was his fourth trip, and
twenty years in space is a long time for any man. The Captain was short, wiry, tough. He rarely smiled,
not even when he got drunk, which was seldom. He was ablaze with energy. Even standing still, eyes
staring into the plates, he seemed charged with electricity, tense, ready for sudden movement.
The control room was different. In the rest of the ship men might joke about the thing that had taken
them light-years from their home, the thing that mocked them on every world they visited. In the rest of
the ship men might relax, and even forget, for a while.
You didn't relax here, and you didn't forget.
Arvon kept out of the way. He was a stranger here; this was not his part of the ship, no matter how
much he might have wished it to be.
"Get on with it, Derryoc," the Captain said. His voice was controlled, but vibrantly alive. "We'll be in
position for you within eleven hours."
Derryoc looked at Seyehi. "The usual approach?"
The computer man nodded. "We'll make a circuit around the most favorable planet, five miles up.
We're set up to scan for everything we can detect at that height: population concentrations, radio waves,
energy emissions of any sort at all. We'll make one circuit at the equator first, then cross over the poles.
I've got the computers set to make a level analysis of anything we pick up."
"I'll want maps," the anthropologist said.
"You'll have them. Anything else?"
The anthropologist clasped his hands behind his back. "Well, after your computers report that the
planet is uninhabited by any so-called intelligent life—"
"You mean if, not after, Derryoc," the Captain interrupted.
Derryoc shrugged. "If, then," he corrected without conviction. "If the inevitable happens, I want Hafij
to take her down as close as he can, where I can see for myself. There's always a mathematical chance
for a low-energy culture, and I'll want to look at it before we go barging in on it."
"That all?"
"That's all for now." Derryoc turned to the Captain. "You'll have the screens up, Wyik?"
"I won't be taking any chances."
"Right. Come on, Arvon—let's have a drink before we go to work."
They left the control room and went back to the bar, which was little more than a cubicle set into the
wall. Derryoc broke out a bottle and two glasses, and the two men drank.
Arvon felt the liquor warming him, and he was glad to have it. He tried not to anticipate the despair
that was coming, but the hopelessness piled up with the years—it was not difficult to understand
Nlesihe's dark outlook, no matter how trying it became.
If only all the planets were uninhabited by men.
That wouldn't have been so bad.
"Why did you come out here, anyway?" Derryoc asked suddenly, pouring his second drink. "Didn't
you have a deal at home?"
Arvon smiled, remembering. The big home in the country, the tapestries, the books, the warmth. And
the cities, the plays, the women …
"I had too much of a deal," he said.
Derryoc downed half the drink at a gulp. "I don't understand you," he said honestly.