Читать онлайн «The Long Way Home»

The spaceship flashed out of superdrive and hung in a darkness that blazed with stars. For a moment there was silence, then:

“Where’s the sun?”

Edward Langley swiveled his pilot’s chair around. It was very still in the cabin, only the whisper of ventilators had voice, and he heard his heart thutter with an unnatural loud-ness. Sweat prickled his ribs, the air was hot.

“I... don’t know,” he said finally. The words fell hard and empty. There were screens on the control panel which gave him a view of the whole sky, he saw Andromeda and the Southern Cross and the great sprawl of Orion, but nowhere in that crystal black was the dazzle he had expected.

Weightlessness was like an endless falling.

“We’re in the general region, all right,” he went on after a minute. “The constellations are the same, more or less. But—” His tones faded out.

Four pairs of eyes searched the screens with hunger. Finally Matsumoto spoke. “Over here... in Leo... brightest star visible. Do you see it?”

They stared at the brilliant yellow spark. “It’s got the right color, I think,” said Blaustein. “But it’s an awful long ways off. ”

After another pause he grunted impatiently and leaned over in his seat toward the spectroscope. He focused it carefully on the star, slipped in a plate of the solar spectrum, and punched a button on the comparison unit. No red light flashed.

“The same, right down to the Fraunhofer lines,” he declared. “Same intensity of each line to within a few quanta. That’s either Sol or his twin brother. ”

“But how far off?” whispered Matsumoto.

Blaustein tuned in the photoelectric analyzer, read the answer off a dial, and whipped a slide rule through his fingers. “About a third of a light-year,” he said. “Not too far.

“Much too far,” grunted Matsumoto. “We should’a come out within one A. U. on the nose. Don’t tell me the engine’s gone haywire again. ”

“Looks that way, don’t it?” murmured Langley. His hands moved toward the controls. “Shall I try jumping her in close?”

“No,” said Matsumoto. “If our positioning error is this bad, one more hop may land us right inside the sun. ”

“Which’d be almost like landing in hell or Texas,” said Langley. He grinned, though there was an inward sickness at his throat. “O. K. , boys, you might as well go aft and start overhauling that rattletrap. The sooner you find the trouble, the sooner we can get back home. ”

They nodded, unbuckled themselves, and swung out of the pilot room. Langley sighed.

“Nothing you or I can do but wait, Saris,” he said.

The Holatan made no answer. He never spoke unnecessarily. His huge sleek-furred body was motionless in the acceleration couch they had jury-rigged for him, but the eyes were watchful. There was a faint odor about him, not unpleasing, a hint of warm sunlit grass within a broad horizon. He seemed out of place in this narrow metal coffin, he belonged under an open sky, near running water.

Langley’s thoughts strayed. A third of a light-year. It’s not too much. I’ll come back to you, Peggy, if I have to crawl all the way on my belly.