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

Far out in space the stars disappeared, and the night winked out as though it had never existed. The
ship made the wrenching transition into the distortion field without apparent difficulty; the high hum again
filled the ship, and the gray desolation of not-space surrounded it.
Even within the field, which had the effect of lessening the distance between two points in normal
space by means of "folding" space around the ship, it took time to travel over four light-years.
Time enough to think.
The men in the ship—with the exception of the priest they always referred to it as simply the Bucket,
never the Good Hope—went about the business of being themselves, presenting their social personalities
to each other like so many suits of armor. But there was no man among them, no matter how flip his
words, who did not carry a knot of ice deep within him, a chill that no thermostat could regulate, and no
sun warm.
For the ship was searching, searching a galaxy as other ships had searched before her, and would
search after her.
She was searching for hope, and there was no hope. Man had found many things in space: new
worlds, new loneliness, new marvels.
But he had found no hope there, not on all the worlds of all the suns that sprinkled a summer night as
stars.
It would not have been so bad, Arvon thought, if they had found no other men like themselves in the
universe they knew. If they had sailed their ships out of Lortas and had encountered only rocks and
empty seas and boiling lava—that would not have hurt them, that would only have meant that they were,
after all, alone.
Or if they had but found the cardboard horrors pasted together by a generation and more of the
innocents who happily constructed space thrillers for the young at heart—how wonderful that would have
been, how gay, how exciting! Arvon would have welcomed that colorful fiction parade with open arms:
reptilian monsters slathering after ripe young cuties, mutants who had no emotions coldly plotting the
obliteration of the Good Guys with the Sense of Humor, hungry planets that were just overgrown
digestive systems, waiting for spaceships as a starving man might await a tin can—
Better still, if only they had encountered the noble princes and beautiful princesses and nasty old
prime ministers of Other Worlds, or even a galactic civilization of swell old geniuses, waiting to take the
brash young people of Lortas by the hand, and eager to lead their immature steps into a Promised Land
of togas and fountains and bubbles and Big Clean Thoughts …
But the ships had gone out, and space was no longer a dream.
 Dreams could be fun, even nightmares.
Reality was different, and it hurt.
When the distortion field had been perfected, making possible interstellar flight in a matter of months
instead of generations, the first exploring ships had gone out eagerly, confidently. Sure, they were armed
to the teeth, ready for the monsters their myths had prepared them for, but they were ready, too, for men
of their own kind. They were drilled, trained, disciplined. There would be no awkward incidents, no
sophomoric misunderstandings that might lead to disaster.
They were looking for friends, not enemies. Somewhere out there, they argued, somewhere in that
vast starry universe that was their home, there would be other men, other intelligences, other civilizations.
The people of Lortas were not fools. They knew, even at the start, that one world alone was only a
tiny fraction of the worlds that must exist. Just as an isolated island, completely cut off from contact with
other islands and other continents, must develop a less complex culture than those areas situated at the
crossroads of the world, so must a planet alone amount to far less than a planet that was a part of
something bigger.
Cultures grow through contact with other cultures.
No great civilization ever grew in just one sealed area, with only its own ideas to keep it going.
Fresh viewpoints, new ideas, different historical traditions—these were the ingredients that made for
greatness. Here a people learned to smelt metal, there a culture hit upon electricity, somewhere else a