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Дэймон Найт: Orbit 4

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Дэймон Найт Orbit 4

Orbit 4: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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“This is a choice collection of haunting tales collected by the founder of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Most of the stories typify the emerging new domain of science fiction, with its emphasis less on the ‘out-there’ than on the ‘right-here, right-now.’ Harlan Ellison, for example, in ‘Shattered Like a Glass Goblin,’ paints a picture of a houseful of hippies in the thrall of drugs and bestiality that is much too believable for comfort. In ‘Probable Cause,’ Charles Harness cites the use of clairvoyance in a case before the Supreme Court; and Kate Wilhelm portrays the agonizing problems of a computer analyst working on a robot weapon which requires the minds of dead geniuses to operate effectively. These are only a few of the many celebrated science fiction writers whose stories are included in the anthology, ‘Orbit 4.’ ”

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Feldman looked disappointed. His silence invited Thornton to keep talking, but there was nothing more to say about it. Thornton said, “The Phalanx is the final solution to the problem of modem warfare. It is an armored computer bank designed to control at least twenty-five subunits at this time, and it will have the capacity to control n subunits when it is completed. The subunits to this point have been built to scout jungle trails, and go through undergrowth where there are no trails searching out the enemy. They come equipped with flame throwers, grenade launchers, rocket launchers, communications units, infrared sensors, mass sensors, mine laying, or mine detection devices, chemical analysis labs, still and movie cameras, audio sensors and transmitters . .

He became aware of Feldman’s bright, unblinking gaze and he paused and grinned at the analyst. Softly he added, “But the main problem with the Phalanx is that it doesn’t know what a smile is on a friendly face. It can’t distinguish between friend and enemy. It can’t tell if the metal it senses is a gun or a hoe. It has no way of knowing if the mass-burdened heat source is a man with a howitzer or an ass with a load of firewood. And no matter how many changes the psycho-cybernetics lab sends to me, I can’t program those things into it.”

Thornton stood up and stretched. His gaze followed a low, long shaft of sunlight coming through the Venetian blind where a slat was crooked. “I’m going for a walk,” he said. He sensed that Feldman made a motion toward him, but there was no effort to stop him, or to force him to complete his hour.

“Tomorrow at five,” Feldman said, and that was all.


His thighs burned as he climbed. He had wanted to climb the hill ever since the first tracery of white blossom had appeared high on its side, but no time, no time. And now his thighs burned. He should write to Ethel tonight. Hadn’t even opened her last letter yet. He had put it down somewhere and had forgotten it. On the dresser in his room? On his desk? He groaned to himself at the thought of his desk, and he slipped on a moss-covered rock and banged his knee. Sitting on the damp pungent ground he rocked back and forth nursing the knee for a few minutes, catching his breath. He had come farther than he realized. Below him, almost hidden, he could see the Institute building. It had started as a low, long simple two-story building, but had been extended in three directions, like dominoes, and at the end of one of the newer additions there was construction going on. He had a vision of it worming its way over the hills, growing like a snake through the mountains, creeping through valleys, over crests, following watercourses ... He closed his eyes and composed part of the letter to Ethel. It would be dull, he decided, faltering after the initial hope-you-are-well bit. Ethel was a good woman, but dull. God, she was dull. He remembered the shock he had felt the day he understood that Ethel had settled in on herself, that she would change no more, only become more what she was, more dogmatic, less malleable to change of any sort, more picture-pretty and smug. Ethel was forty. She . had been forty on her twenty-fifth birthday, would be forty on her eightieth. But she was good, kind, considerate, a good mother, a faithful and helpful wife, good social animal. . .

They could say that about him. A good man. Plodding maybe, but a good man. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Good to his kids, a real father.

He leaned back against a treetrunk and watched the sunset without thinking.

A good man.

The breeze on his cheek was warm and fragrant with spring. Gradually he forgot about the cold, damp ground beneath him. He thought about the three kids. Bang, bang, bang, three years, three kids. That was the way they had wanted it. Have them all together, raise them together and be done with that part of it. By the time we’re both forty, they’ll be almost grown and we’ll still be young. Well, he was forty-four, and they were all grown. But he wasn’t young. Ethel wasn’t young. Both of them were good, good, good, but they were not young. He dreamed of romping with the kids, and he knew the romping was wrong. They were glad when he tired of it and left them. He dreamed of his daughter’s soft cheek against his, as she whispered secrets to him, and his yawn that had driven her away. Yet, he did love her with an intensity that sometimes had startled and frightened him. Perhaps that was why he had driven her away. He remembered her flying past him on her bicycle, hair streaming behind her, thin legs pumping harder and harder . . .

We go down the coast in the skiff with the wind driving us hard. Feeling of fear, exhilaration, alertness, watching for the sudden wave that could topple us. Paula’s hair streaming out in the wind, hitting my face, stirring something in me, making me look at her through different eyes for a moment. And the intolerable ache that was Paula. The searing, burning, unbearable pain that meant Paula, and the release that was just as sudden and even more intense.

He jerked from the tree and was on his feet. He shuddered once and started down the hill. He had been dreaming of his wife and the kids. Of his daughter ... A flush of deep shame swept over him and he stumbled blindly back to the Institute.


“Dr. Thornton, there has to be a way to program these abstracts, as you call them.” Melvin Jorgenson paced. He was a restless man. Even pacing failed to satisfy his need to move, and in his hands he carried and played with a pen whose point he extended and retracted over and over, each time making an audible click. Thornton noticed that he was pacing in time to the click, or was he clicking in time to his tread? He said nothing, and waited. Maybe they were going to fire him.

The Director was there also, and it was to him Jorgenson was addressing himself, although he prefaced his remarks with Thornton’s name. The Director looked unhappy.

“You know that we have been experimenting with various techniques,” Jorgenson said, glancing at Thornton, but still talking to the Director. “We have a simple psycho-modular unit in operation now, much like the one you described in your book of several years ago. That gave us the necessary line to follow, but as I say, this is a simple unit.”

He continued to talk and pace and by listening to him very carefully, and ignoring the clicks as much as possible, Thornton finally understood that there was to be a major revision in the Phalanx, and he was to program the revised version with all the data that already had gone into the obsolete model. He started to laugh and continued to laugh until someone, the Director himself, brought him water. He said that he had strangled on a smothered cough, that he had caught cold when he had fallen asleep out in the woods a few nights ago. He allowed Jorgenson to lead him to the new unit ready to be connected to the Phalanx, and he asked the right questions, intelligent questions, and he made intelligent notes and finally said, sure, why not?


“The Phalanx,” he wrote in his diary (because writing it, even though he would have to destroy what he had written afterward, set it in his mind: once written, never forgotten, he had learned early in his school career, and so had gone through school laboriously copying passages, notes, sometimes almost whole textbooks; he had remembered all of it, still remembered all of it), “is apparently a small building, and only on close approach can you see that there are treads under it, hidden by sides that come almost to the ground. There are pseudo-windows, a pseudo-exterior that can be made to conform to any local style of building. Inside . . He put the pen down and walked to the window. It was raining hard. He was slightly feverish; he really had caught a cold, and he had taken the afternoon off on the instructions of the infirmary doctor. He was supposed to be sleeping now, but the sound of the rain was unsettling instead of soothing, and he wanted to be out in it, walking bareheaded under the driving, stinging sheets of water. He thought yearningly of the pneumonia that would almost certainly follow, and the discharge from present duties, and the long rest afterward. Rest, travel, sunbathing, reading, being conducted through the computer laboratories of major countries throughout the world. His name would be magic after a year on the project, even if they hadn’t brought it off yet. Eventually they would, and then everyone connected with it would be known, not to the public, but to their peers, where it mattered. He pulled the blind over the window and returned to the diary.

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