"Robert F. Young - To Touch a Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

TO TOUCH A STAR
ROBERT F. YOUNG

The blue star was an anti-paradox manifestation ... Powers, falling helplessly into it, was a
paradox

1. ChiMuZeta was discovered in ancient times, possibly as early as 4000 A.D. However, its
discoverers knew only its initial properties and doubtless this was why they classified as radiation
and nicknamed "saltpeter" a force that transcends both space and time and supervises the
consistency of the history of man . . .

THE spaceship Powers had stolen in his bid to regain his manhood was one of the new
superfreighters the Company had recently put into use. Powers was no stranger to sophisticated ships but
this one was not merely sophisticated—it was ultra-sophisticated. It did his laundry, prepared his meals
and made his bed. It thought up games for the two of them to play and told him stories to amuse him. It
kept him company when he was lonely and sang Brahms' Lullaby to him when he couldn't sleep. It was
all things to him—mentor, servant, maid, slave. The only function it couldn't perform was that of mistress.
But Powers had no need of a mistress. That was why he was journeying to the Blue Star.
The ship's name was M.A.R.Y.
M for Morning Mist
A for Afterglow
R for Reawakening
Y for Yearning.
These were the planets it had been commissioned to serve; was how freighters derived their names.
The Blue Star had no name only a catalog number: X-10-D. But catalog numbers frequently become
names and this had happened in the case of the Blue Star. Over the years X-10-D had transmuted to
Extend.
Centered in the viewscreen of the Mary, it brought to mind a bright blue diamond lying in a jeweler's
showcase. There are other diamonds in the showcase—red ones, yellow, green, orange but these were
relatively insignificant in the Blue Star's presence: mere grains of cosmic dust the cosmic jeweler had
forgotten to flick from his cosmic show-cushion.
Powers, who had begun life as a foundling and who had once been an hermaphrodite, had been
staring at the star for some time. Now he turned his eyes away to rest them, but the Blue Star went right
on burning on his retina almost as intensely as it burned in his brain.
He bent over the star map he had come into the chart room to study. If he succeeded in regaining his
virility he would need a faraway place to expend it—preferably one on the other side of the galaxy from
both Crag and Sublime. Crag was the home of the penal colony in which he had abided for four years
and Sublime was the home of the the institute for Sublime Learning—more commonly known as "Salt
Peter's Cathedral"—where he had been impotentialized.
He had a second reason for studying the map. The Beta Tau Storms. He knew that only the ship
could see him safely through them but he wanted to know where they were.

AS HE sat staring at the little purple spirals that denoted their general whereabouts, the door of the
chart room opened and the "stewardess" came in. Powers didn't want to look at her but he did anyway.
The ship was some forty hours out from Twilight, the Company-owned planet where he had stolen it, yet
he still wasn't wholly accustomed to this compelling combination of postures, attitudes, charm,
companionableness, erudition and femininity electronically transformed into a comely girl.
He watched her as she walked toward him across the room, looked at her hungrily as she paused
beside him. Faint golden fuzz grew upon her rounded forearms; her perfume made him think of terrestrial
fields of buttercups and clover. The curve of her chin made his heart ache.