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

there herself...if Walter hadn't.
There had almost been a mutiny after Hades. A
near half of the crew were urging tottering old Captain
Hawkins to give up the whole idea of trading with
future planets. They wanted either to settle down on
one of the colonized worlds, or even to find some new
one from the old robot-probe reports and start a colony
of their own. That was when Hans Horeger had
become the actual captain, in all but name. He was the
one who stirred everyone up to go on.
Anyway, it wasn't a good idea. Nobody was
settling new worlds right now. There were at least a
dozen that the robot probes had identified by now, and
maybe more reports still coming in from stars still
farther away. But by now everybody knew how hard
it was to start a colony in a world where no human
being, no creature from Earth at all, had ever lived
before. The rage for colonizing had worn itself out
centuries (Earth-time centuries, at least) before.
Oh, no doubt the pioneering spirit would blossom
back to life again some time some later time,
maybe a few centuries down the pike, when all the
new worlds were themselves beginning to bulge at the
seams and the adventurers and the malcontents would
yearn to move on. But not just yet. And definitely not
with the discouraged, tired, aging crew of the starship
Nordvik.
Mercy MacDonald shook herself and got back to
work. Maybe Slowyear would be better.
Maybe it wouldn't, too, because tramp starships
like Nordvik didn't get to the better worlds. Ships like
Nordvik didn't have any real reason for being anymore.
Ships like Nordvik were fossils. The only reason their
cooperative had been able to buy it in the first place
was that whole class of starships had already been
made obsolete by the new grid-function vessels that
could actually land on a planet's surface, at least when
the planet was big enough and prosperous enough to
afford a landing system. Nordwks were a disappearing
breed, good for nothing but wandering around the
poorest and least developed colony worlds, in hope of
transacting a little business and replenishing their
supplies so they could wander a little farther.
But as she patiently checked over the invoices,
MacDonald wondered whether even a poor world
would be poor enough to want to buy any of the things
they had to sell. Some of the appliances and machines
aboard Nordvikwete ten or fifteen years old ship's
time and technology had progressed beyond them
wherever they had gone. Their trade goods were