[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Eve blushed, and rammed the car into a sort of kangaroo leap which lifted us from the ground and threwus into a jerky flight.The engine groaned, and she settled us into horizontal by brute force, with areasonable helping of wilful ignorance.The ride was rough for a couple more minutes while she piled onthe power going around bends, but she calmed down before anyone's hair had a chance to turn white.'Have you considered my offer?' asked delArco, turning around to face us.Johnny opened his mouth toreply, but I interrupted him.'We're both considering your propositions,' I said.'Neither of us knows enough yet to be sure.Afterwe've seen the ship we'll be in a better position to decide.'He seemed perfectly satisfied by that, and Johnny was content to let me do the talking for both of us.'What's the name of the ship, Mr delArco?' asked Johnny.The Hooded Swan,' Eve answered for him.'It was my idea.''That's a strange name,' he said, hesitating slightly over the word 'strange'.'It was another name for the bird called a dodo,' she explained.'You have an odd sense of humour,' I remarked.'A lot of people would think that's a bad name for aship.''But you don't believe in bad luck,' she said.'No.''Then it's all right.In any case, it will be conventional ships which eventually wind up as dead as thedodo.Not this ship.''Don't count your dodos before they're hatched,' I said dryly.She went red again.Eve took the car into the old yards.There were newer, better yards on the south side that still saw aGenerated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.htmlcertain amount of work, but these were deserted.There hadn't been a liner built here in twenty years, andeven the private concerns didn't bother with them now.There was better accommodation available foranyone who thought that he simply had to build on Earth.There was the sound of hammering andtinkering emanating from one tower, but it sounded lonely and distant.It was probably somebodymessing about with his car.In the bays over the far side of the yards I could see three yachts and acouple of obsolete cargo ships.The yachts were probably strictly for joyriding, and the cargo ships eitherantiques or scrap.There were a couple of people wandering around, but they were too aimless to beworkers.Sightseers, perhaps, or scavengers.They seemed to me like vermin crawling in the corpse ofthe yards.It had never been more evident that Earth was dead.We were nearly two miles out in the complex before we came to our destination.The yard delArco wasusing was about the most isolated he could find.It was dead quiet.The yard had a high wall, with noovert signs of occupancy, but I could see that the tower within held something more than dust.Inaddition, there were men on top of the tower - not obvious to the casual glance, but visible if you lookedhard enough.The gateway was guarded too.We were admitted through a small hatch in the door, but only afterdelArco had been scrutinised and identified.I wondered whether all this was a product of delArco'shitherto unsuspected flair for the melodramatic, or whether the New Alexandrians really thought theirproject warranted this kind of cloak-and-dagger treatment.'Are there booby traps as well?' I asked.DelArco nodded absently, while he searched for the right key to open the outer door of the tower.Hehad to find two more for the inner doors, but we finally made it into the inner sanctum, where we weregreeted with false warmness by some guy who'd been waiting for us for some time.I shook his handwithout looking at him or hearing his name.My eyes were on the ship.It's one thing to sit on a chair in front of an HV screen, with the remains of lunch still on the table andcigarette ash on the carpet, and talk about a ship.It's quite a different matter to stand underneath herbelly and look up at her.In Johnny Socoro's house, the Hooded Swan had been an abstraction - a ship that couldn't fly, anextravagant dream.Here, in the dimness of her construction tower, she was a living thing.A reality, full ofsubstance and beauty.I'm not a Lapthorn, to fall in love with a ship.But I'm a spaceman.Ships are my life, my outer skin, mypower and my glory.When I see a ship, I don't lose my mind in an orgiastic well of emotion, like six out of seven bad spacers.I'm not overwhelmed by the loveliness and sheer majesty of a ship.But I know these things for what theyare.I can see them.And the Hooded Swan was lovely.Make no mistake about that.A ship's performance in deep-space isn't necessarily connected to her presence on the ground, or lackof it, but a spacer's confidence is.DelArco was right.This ship wasn't a bullet - not a steel worm or agiant metal egg on stilts.This ship was a bird.It was built to move.I hadn't fully appreciated before whatdelArco had implied when he said the ship was jointed.This ship was like a living being - a bird withfeathers of shiny metal.A deep-space albatross.Liners are built to look graceful, to look proud, to lookpowerful.But the real paucity of their ambition couldn't be appreciated until you compared them to theHooded Swan.Eve Lapthorn was right, too.This ship might make rigid ships obsolete.If she flew aswell as she looked.If she flew at all.Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html'She looks good,' I said calmly.They smiled, because they knew I was understating deliberately.They'd watched me looking at her [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]