"Rudy Rucker - The Man Who Ate Himself" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

know why, but she loved that scrawny old earthraper.

I was ready to forget the contract and leave, but the gate-control buttons were keyed to Marston's and
Evangel-ine's fingerprints only. And Evangeline wanted to do things just as Marston had planned.

So I helped her put him in his cylindrical coffin. It was made of strips of wood fit together like a Chinese
puzzle. Marston had made it himself out of a cottonwood tree he'd cut down to dig his garden. We slid
Marston in there naked and took him downstairs to the walk-in freezer.

The physical labor of hauling the coffin to the basement helped calm Evangeline down. I strained my back
and ended up wishing I'd gotten the android to help. When the old man was stowed like he'd wanted, I
helped myself to some more of his bourbon and sat down on the porch with Evangeline. The shrilling of
the grasshoppers washed over us.

"Where is that awful toad-man?" Evangeline asked suddenly. It was not dear to me what she wanted him
for.

"Harry didn't kill your husband, Mrs. Marston. It was cancer. And, if you'll forgive my saying so, your
husband's companies have probably led to more...."

"You don't have to tell me that, Mr. Fletcher. My husband knew what he did to the Earth. And he was
scared the Earth wouldn't forgive him for it.

That's one of the reasons__" Her voice caught.

"One of the reasons he wanted us to launch him into space," I filled in. "Well it shouldn't be hard. He's
already got the rocket?"

"Yes, we have it in an underground silo right over there." She waved towards the barn. "And Van and I
built his own little capsule for him." She pushed her voice on. "All you and ... and Dr. Gerber have to do
is to plan a course and install something to keep him from falling into any stars."

"He wants to float in outer space forever," I said. "That's fine with me. Let me show you how the system
works." I got out some papers. I'd done most of the work on this one and was eager to impress this
beautiful woman.

The heart of the system was a set of piezoelectric crystals. Whenever Mar-ston's capsule approached a
gravitating object, the tidal forces would squeeze a trickle of current out of one of the cyrstals. Each
crystal was hooked in to a little ion jet. The result was that Marston's capsule would automatically adjust
its path to avoid any star or planet which came its way. In the absolute cold of outer space, the crystal
would be sensitive enough to react to a star that was still a light-year off. Since the guidance jets would
react so early, they didn't have to be very strong.

"Yes," Evangeline said when I'd finished explaining. "But what happens when the jets run out of juice?"

I hadn't expected her to think of that. "The charge should be more than adequate for a thousand years," I
extemporized. "That certainly...."

"It's not forever," she protested. "Van wants to last forever ... not just end up in some star a thousand
years from now."