Читать книгу Passage to Gomorrah - Robert F. Young - Страница 5

She was the Galaxy’s most beautiful whore. He knew that if he went to her couch during the time-storm, he, too, would be booking

Even for a lady of the stars, the Lady Berenice was beautiful. Her short blonde hair made Cross think of Martian maize, and her blue eyes, set wide apart in her tanned, oval face, reminded him of the ice lakes of Frigidia. Her tall, Junoesque body put to shame the porno-graphic photographs he had seen of it, cheapened the lurid passages he had read about it; betrayed, as yet, no evidence of her apostasy.

He wondered who her lover was, and why she had refused to reveal him.

When the Jacob’s lift hatched levels with the Pandora’s lock, she stepped lightly into the ship beside him. The corporation officer who had accompanied her, handed him her papers, then signaled to the longstarmen below. After a moment the lift and its sole occupant sank from sight.

“How soon do we blast?” the Lady Berenice asked.

She was looking at Cross intently, as though trying to probe beyond the bleak grayness of his eyes. “In about fifteen minutes, my lady,” he said.

She nodded, stepped into the ship proper. He sealed the lock and escorted her up the spiral companionway to her cabin.

She paused in the doorway. “I’d like my luggage, please.”

“I’ll bring it up as soon as we’re in A Priori, my lady. Right now, I’ll have to insist that you strap yourself on the acceleration couch.”

He watched as she did his bidding. “You can get up as soon as the ‘all clear’ signal sounds,” he said presently.

She nodded again, not in the least perturbed. He wondered if she’d be equally calm if “acceleration couch” was something more than a hand-me-down term from pre-degravitation days; if she’d be equally composed if she had to contend with 3 or 4 g’s, instead of just the temporary instability of blast-off.

She probably would be, he decided. A miscarriage would not affect her banishment to Gomorrah, but it would save her the unpleasantness of having to give birth to a mutant.

He excused himself and headed for the control room.

A Priori drive, once activated, required no supervision except in cases of emergency. The Pandora was only a one-passenger-one-pilot job, but Falcon Lines, Inc., had a reputation throughout the civilized sector of the galaxy for fast, efficient service, and even its smallest ships boasted the latest in automatic equipment.

Cross secured the control-room door behind him, made his way leisurely down the spiral companionway to the hold, where the Wine-Women-and-Song longstarmen had deposited the Lady Berenice’s luggage. Even in the artificial ½ g, the two bags were heavy and he was breathing a little hard when he halted before her door.

He knocked. “Yes?” she answered, her voice muffled by the sound of running water.

“Your luggage, my lady.”

The sound of running water ceased, and presently she opened the door. She had wrapped a ship’s towel deftly around her torso. It was a white towel that enhanced the hue of her clear, tanned skin. Water glistened on her golden shoulders, ran in twinkling rivulets down her coppery thighs and calves. “Set them inside, please.”

Cross complied. She did not move an inch, and his arm, despite his efforts to avoid touching her, brushed her thigh. He withdrew quickly. His arm tingled and his hands were trembling. He kept his eyes averted because he knew what she would read in them. “If you wish anything further, I’ll be in my cabin,” he said. He turned to go.

“Wait,” she said.

“Yes?”

“How—how long will we be in A Priori?”

“A little over four hours, ship’s time.”

“Is—is there any likelihood of a time storm?”

The question surprised him. Passengers, especially passengers of the Lady Berenice’s status, did not usually concern themselves with the exigencies of space travel. They took it for granted, unless otherwise apprised, that such exigencies did not exist. “There is always a chance of a time storm,” he said. “But don’t worry, my lady. If the conditions for one are present, we will be contacted by the port authority in time to avoid it.”

“But suppose something should go wrong. Suppose we weren’t informed in time and did get involved in one. What would happen then?”

He could not keep his eyes averted forever, and he forced himself to meet her gaze. He was mildly shocked to see that a quantity of her composure had left her, that there was a certain diffidence in the expression on her face.

Presently: “As you may know, my lady,” he said, “A Priori is merely the result of the separation of pure space and pure time from the thing-in-itself, or from basic reality. Once separated, pure space can be contracted to the extent where a parsec equals .59 kilometers. Usually pure time contracts accordingly, but sometimes there is a slight discrepancy, and certain phases of A Priori contain more time than space. If we should become involved in one of these phases—or storms if you like—we would lose our awareness of our objective reality and proceed to relive a subjective and sporadic play-back of our pasts. So all that could happen to us, actually, are the things that have already happened to us—with the difference that we would relive not only our own experiences, but one another’s as well; in pure time, individuality does not exist.”

“But wouldn’t our objective reality be affected?”

He nodded. “It could be,” he said, “since, in the absence of any real passage of time, it would be in temporal ratio to our involvement in our pasts, which might force it into a different time plane altogether.”

She dropped her eyes. “Then—then in spite of what you said before, something could happen after all—something that hasn’t happened before.”

“I suppose so, my lady...Will that be all?”

“Yes—for now.”

“I’ll be in my cabin...”

“Cabin” was a euphemism for “cubicle.” The cramped compartment adjoining the control room contained a couch, a desk, a small micro-film library and a well-stocked liquor cabinet, but that was about all. Cross opened the cabinet and poured himself a generous brandy. He drank it fast, then he lay down on the couch and tried to sleep. He always slept out the A Priori phases of his runs if they were under eight hours, but he had a good idea that he was going to have a hard time sleeping this one out. He was right. The minute he closed his eyes he saw a white towel and a golden sunrise of shoulders; two breath-taking colonnades of tanned, glistening flesh—There was no sleeping after that.

He swore aloud. Surely she must realize that an ordinary Pilot like himself couldn’t afford her. Then why had she deliberately exhibited her deluxe charms? Why had she deliberately delayed him at the door with so obviously false an excuse as a discussion on the unstable phase of A priori? He was certainly not naive enough to think that, just because she was a fallen lady of the stars, she would waive her fee. If fourteen years space had taught him nothing else, it had taught him that any extraterrestrial act of love was a business transaction and nothing more.

Still—

He turned angrily on his side, tried to shut her from his mind. She can go to hell, he thought—

But she didn’t. She went to New America, instead. He accosted her on a sunny avenue in Little Chicago and they turned, hand in hand, down a narrow street lined with transplanted maples. The season was spring, and the warm air had activated the thermo-statically controlled Hi-Fi’s hidden in the foliage, and the air was filled with the singing of robins. After a while they came to a shaded walk that wound up to a secluded cottage, and they walked through scented coolness to the door. He noticed, then, that all the while they’d been walking, she’d been wearing nothing but a towel; and it must have been raining, too, despite the sunshine, for her shoulders were glistening with rain-drops, and raindrops twinkled on her long, tanned legs—

He was sitting up on the couch. He was sweating. “I’ll be damned!” he said. There was a persistent bell-like sound in his ears, and presently he recognized it as the beeping of the communicator. He got up, then, and went into the control room and picked up the neatly typed message which the receiver had emitted:

From: Port Authority, Wine-Women-and-Song, Thais

To: Nathaniel Cross, Pandora

A Priori disturbance reported bulding up in path of your reality-flow. Emerge into normal space at once and await further instructions. Acknowledge.

Cross stared at the words. Was the Lady Berenice clairvoyant? Had she known there was going to be a storm?

He hurried toward the control panel. Suddenly he thought of the towel again, the towel and the deliberate shower. He tried to tell himself that there was nothing unethical in a lady of the stars trying to work off her passage, but it didn’t do any good, and his anger kept intensifying till it superseded his common sense, till it transformed him from a seasoned pilot into a frustrated schoolboy. The control panel simply hadn’t been designed to be operated by a frustrated schoolboy, and when his fingers sought to punch out the pattern that would snap the Pandora back into normal space, they punched, instead, a set of symbols sufficiently unintelligible to activate the alarm.

The alarm performed a two-fold function: it alerted authorized persons and, at the same time, it temporarily incapacitated the particular unauthorized person who had triggered it. Cross staggered back against the bulkhead, his fingers tingling from the automatic shock, his body going numb. He slid slowly to the deck, still conscious but unable to move his limbs.

The first wave of the storm struck, and the ship began to shimmer. Lying there, watching the room dissolve around him, he experienced a strange interval of detachment, and he wondered curiously how much he really knew about himself: whether the outrageous mistake he had just made had been the result of his anger, or whether his anger had merely been a trumped-up excuse for making the mistake; whether the entire action had not resulted from a masochistic desire to participate in the Lady Berenice’s past....