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dead and now he was again functioning in a sense, alive. Thirty-five years, he thought, as close as makes no difference. What's the universe been up to? Before pursuing that, he meshed himself with the ship's instruments and computers. The data reassured him. Everything that could be under control was. Not that he had ever doubted the vessel he'd renamed Dagny. But something unforeseeable might go wrong for her, or right for an enemy. No, he was on his flight plan, still decelerating but not far from his goal, bound back into the Solar System after more than a millennium away. You could hardly tell by vision. Stars crowded sable clarity, the Milky Way girdled heaven with its crooked winter road, nebulae glimmered, the Andromeda galaxy lay huge, wan, and mysterious: sights he had seen at two other suns and in between, very little changed by his crossing a mere few light-years. Only Sol marked this region out, and at almost six hundred astronomical units' distance, it was only the chief among the stars, fiercely brilliant but casting no more than a third again as much illumination as a full Luna above Earth. Nevertheless, Guthrie dwelt on its image for many minutes. Juliana, he thought. Your ashes lie yonder, strewn on theLeibnizMountains of the Moon where it's always day, mingled with the ashes of my first body, the body that knew you. Dagny enclosed him in silence. She was no c-ship, no Yeager, minimal in mass and thereby able to fly close to the velocity of light. She was a cruiser, also running on field drive but originally meant for interplanetary work. Thus she was amply big to carry cargo, accommodations plus full life and medical support for several humans, and the weapons that the Lunarians of Centauri had installed for him. Seen from outside, she was a conoid, not quite a hundred meters in length, broadening from the bow to a rounded base about forty meters in diameter. Hatches, airlocks, and a few streamlined turrets studded the matte skin. Antennas and dishes were newly deployed, stretch-ing forth skeletal to catch what signals and other infor-mation they could. With speed down to a few score kilometers per second and dropping, the particle deflector field was at low strength, invisible, no longer a glow like St. Elmo's fire streaming aft from ahead of the hull. Guthrie muttered an oath and pulled out of his reverie. The instruments showed three ships under high boost on what must be interception paths. They were plasma-drive, but surely formidable. At any minute a voice on a laser beam would challenge him. He'd better get briefed. By agreement, the Centaurians had beamed an en-crypted update to overtake Dagny a little earlier than now. Of course the news was four and a third years' old the news from Sol that had been relayed back to him was twice that and woefully scant, stating simply what they knew, and even that small bit inevitably dis-torted by misunderstanding, prejudice, and what Guthrie considered superstition. But it was better than nothing. He played the message into his memory without giving it much attention. There'd be time for that during the last stages of his approach. Lunarian rang in his audio sensors. "Aou, ship in-bound out of the fifth octant. Zefor speaks, commanding this detachment of guardians for the Council of Forerun-ners on the free world Proserpina. Name yourself and your purpose.'' Guthrie's reply speared back. He used the same lan-guage, but, as always, gave it his own flavor and threw in some ancient Americanisms. "Come off it, amigo. You know damn well who I am. I'd guess your honchos have been expecting me since before you were born." Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Five billion years ago, when the Solar System was in embryo, a globe began to form, next outward from what would become Mars. Jupiter, already coalescent the gi-ants grew fastest roiled the planetesimals with its grav-ity and aborted this planet. However, some of them had gotten to a size at which the energies of accretion and of radioactivity melted them. Heavy elements sank down to their centers. When they cooled and solidified, they had nickel-iron cores. In the course of time, collisions shat-tered all of them, as well as lesser bodies, until nothing but a belt of asteroids remained. Early on, though, such an accident blasted the outer layers off the largest. The result was a ferrous spheroid two thousand kilometers across. Recoiling, eventually it strayed too close to Jupiter, and the monster threw it out-ward. The new, eccentric orbit was canted about forty-four degrees off the ecliptic plane; like other quantities, this varied somewhat over time. Perihelion brought it within slightly more than a hundred astronomical units of the sun. Aphelion was more than thirty-one thousand astronomical units distant, beyond the Kuiper Belt of comets and well into the Oort Cloud of those icy objects. As eons passed, one of them crashed on it, leaving a rich deposit of frozen water and organics. A metallic impactor bequeathed its own treasures. At this moment in human-kind's existence, the worldlet had rounded Sol and was outbound again. It had not yet come very far; the period was almost two million years. When Guthrie first saw it, remotely and under high magnification, it flashed and glittered, lights everywhere across a once murky surface, light of sun and stars re-flecting off domes, roofs, towers, masts. They streamed past as he drew closer, for his path was curved and the planetoid spun rapidly, once around in nine and a half hours. He began to make out roads, rails, spacefields, ships coming and going like fireflies. Farther off, he rec-ognized structures in space, a few of them satellites, most of them [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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