"Frederick Pohl - Stopping At Slow Year" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

Frederick Pohl
Stopping At Slow Year

Chapter One

The ship was called the Nordvik (though no one
aboard it remembered why), and it was a big one.
Even if you didn't count the thrusters on the outriggers
astern, or the projectors for the Bussard collection cone
at the bow, it was more than a hundred meters long;
if just the habitable part of Nordvik had set down on
any football field on Earth it would have lapped over
at both ends. That would never happen, though. It
had been a good many centuries, Earth time, since
Nordvik1cia.d been anywhere near its home planet, and
there was very little chance that it would ever return.
It also wouldn't happen because Nordvik, or any ship
like it, could never set down on any planet anyway. All
those ancient starships were built in space and lived all
their lives in space mostly interstellar space, at that
and sooner or later they all died in space.
More likely it would be sooner, thought Mercy
MacDonald as she slammed her door in the face of
Deputy Captain Hans Horeger. What MacDonald
didn't want to do was die when the ship did. She had
lived aboard Nordvik for twenty-seven years, ship's
time never mind the time the outside universe went
by; she didn't want to think about that twenty-seven
years and eight planetary systems, and it was time to
find some comfortable place to settle down. With
some suitable man, she hoped. But not just any man.
Certainly not with the fat and lecherous unselec-
tively lecherous, which made it worse Deputy
Captain Hans Horeger.
The first thing MacDonald did was make sure the
door was well locked behind her, with Horeger on the
other side. The second thing was unwrap the towel
she had clutched around her as she dashed out of the
shower stall and dab at her sticky body. The bastard
hadn't even let her rinse before he began grabbing. It
wasn't much use. She moistened a cloth in her
washstand, but you never could get all the soap off
with a cloth. She resigned herself to going around
sticky until her next turn at the showers.
It wasn't hard to do that. She'd had plenty of
practice. The people who couldn't resign themselves
to aggravation didn't last long on a tramp starship; and
there were always plenty of tranks available in her
medicine chest.
She swallowed one, sighed, and set to work.