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发信人: by (春天的小懒虫), 信区: SFworld
标  题: 2010 (23)
发信站: 哈工大紫丁香 (Wed Oct  6 14:47:43 1999), 转信

                           23
                    Rendezvous

Nikolai Ternovsky, Leonov's control and cybernetics expert,
was the only man aboard who could talk to Dr Chandra
on something like his own terms. Although Hal's principal
creator and mentor was reluctant to admit anyone into his
full confidence, sheer physical exhaustion had forced him
to accept help. Russian and Indo-American had formed
a temporary alliance, which functioned surprisingly well.
Most of the credit for this went to the good-natured
Nikolai, who was somehow able to sense when Chandra
really needed him, and when he preferred to be alone. The
fact that Nikolai's English was much the worst on the ship
was totally unimportant, since most of the time both men
spoke a computerese wholly unintelligible to anyone else.
  After a week's slow and careful reintegration, all of Hal's
routine, supervisory functions were operating reliably. He
was like a man who could walk, carry out simple orders, do
unskilled jobs, and engage in low-level conversation. In
human terms, he had an Intelligence Quotient of perhaps
50; only the faintest outlines of his original personality had
yet emerged.
  He was still sleepwalking; nevertheless, in Chandra's ex-
pert opinion he was now quite capable of flying Discovery
from its close orbit around Io up to the rendezvous with Big
Brother.
  The prospect of getting an extra seven thousand
kilometres away from the burning hell beneath them was
welcomed by everyone. Trivial though that distance was in
astronomical terms, it meant that the sky would no longer
be dominated by a landscape that might have been imagined
by Dante or Hieronymus Bosch. And although not even the
most violent eruptions had blasted any material up to the
ships, there was always the fear that Io might attempt to set
a new record. As it was, visibility from Leonov's observa-
tion deck was steadily degraded by a thin film of sulphur,
and sooner or later someone would have to go out and clean
it off.
  Only Curnow and Chandra were aboard Discovery when
Hal was given the first control of the ship. It was a very
limited form of control; he was merely repeating the pro-
gram that had been fed into his memory, and monitoring its
execution. And the human crew was monitoring him: if any
malfunction occurred, they would take over immediately.
  The first burn lasted for ten minutes; then Hal reported
that Discovery had entered the transfer orbit. As soon as
Leonov's radar and optical tracking confirmed that, the
other ship injected itself into the same trajectory. Two
minor in-course corrections were made; then, three hours
and fifteen minutes later, both arrived uneventfully at the
first Lagrange point, L.1 - 10,500 kilometres up, on the
invisible line connecting the centres of Io and Jupiter.
  Hal had behaved impeccably, and Chandra showed un-
mistakable traces of such purely human emotions as satis-
faction and even joy. But by that time, everyone's thoughts
were elsewhere; Big Brother, alias Zagadka, was only a
hundred kilometres away.
  Even from that distance, it already appeared larger than
the Moon as seen from Earth, and shockingly unnatural in
its straight-edged, geometrical perfection. Against the
background of space it would have been completely in-
visible, but the scudding Jovian clouds 350,000 kilometres
below showed it up in dramatic relief. They also produced
an illusion that, once experienced, the mind found almost
impossible to refute. Because there was no way in which
its real location could be judged by the eye, Big Brother
often looked like a yawning trapdoor set in the face of
Jupiter.
  There was no reason to suppose that a hundred
kilometres would-be safer than ten, or more dangerous than
a thousand; it merely seemed psychologically right for a
first reconnaissance. From that distance, the ship's tele-
scopes could have revealed details only centimetres across -
but there were none to be seen. Big Brother appeared
completely featureless; which, for an object that had, pre-
sumably, survived millions of years of bombardment by
space debris, was incredible.
  When Floyd stared through the binocular eyepiece, it
seemed to him that he could reach out and touch those
smooth, ebon surfaces -just as he had done on the Moon,
years ago. That first time, it had been with the gloved hand
of his spacesuit. Not until the Tycho monolith had been
enclosed in a pressurized dome had he been able to use his
naked hand.
  That had made no difference; he did not feel that he had
ever really touched TMA-1. The tips of his fingers had
seemed to skitter over an invisible barrier, and the harder he
pushed, the greater the repulsion grew. He wondered if Big
Brother would produce the same effect.
  Yet before they came that close, they had to make every
test they could devise and report their observations to
Earth. They were in much the same position as explosives
experts trying to defuse a new type of bomb, which might
be detonated by the slightest false move. For all that they
could tell, even the most delicate of radar probes might
trigger some unimaginable catastrophe.
  For the first twenty-four hours, they did nothing except
observe with passive instruments - telescopes, cameras,
sensors on every wavelength. Vasili Orlov also took the
opportunity of measuring the slab's dimensions with the
greatest possible precision, and confirmed the famous l 4:9
ratio to six decimal places. Big Brother was exactly the same
shape as TMA-l - but as it was more than two kilometres
long, it was 718 times larger than its small sibling.
  And there was a second mathematical mystery. Men had
been arguing For years over that 1:4:9 ratio - the squares of
the first three integers. That could not possibly be a coin-
cidence; now here was another number to conjure with.
  Back on Earth, statisticians and mathematical physicists
were soon playing happily with their computers, trying to
relate the ratio to the fundamental constants of nature - the
velocity of light, the proton/electron mass ratio, the fine
structure constant. They were quickly joined by a gaggle of
numerologists, astrologers, and mystics, who threw in the
height of the Great Pyramid, the diameter of Stonehenge,
the azimuth bearings of the Nazca lines, the latitude of
Easter Island, and a host of other factors from which they
were able to draw the most amazing conclusions about the
future. They were not in the least deterred when a cele-
brated Washington humorist claimed that his calculations
proved that the world ended on 31 December 1999 - but
that everyone had had too much of a hangover to notice.
  Nor did Big Brother appear to notice the two ships that
had arrived in its vicinity - even when they cautiously
probed it with radar beams and bombarded it with strings of
radio pulses which, it was hoped, would encourage any
intelligent listener to answer in the same fashion.
  After two frustrating days, with the approval of Mission
Control, the ships halved their distance. From fifty
kilometres, the largest face of the slab appeared about four
times the width of the Moon in Earth's sky - impressive,
but not so large as to be psychologically overwhelming. It
could not yet compete with Jupiter, ten times larger still;
and already the mood of the expedition was changing from
awed alertness to a certain impatience.
  Walter Curnow spoke for almost everyone: `Big Brother
may be willing to wait a few million years - we'd like to get
away a little sooner.'

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