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briefly. After two minutes, it pitched and yawed again, and then blasted for
exactly ten minutes. He went forward again and the screen was blank except for
the top line:
STEALTH & TIME TO DECELERATION 87 MIN 23 SEC, which was counting down.
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BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman
"What happens if the computer breaks down?" Dallas asked.
"It won't," Doris said. "We've used it for twenty years with no problems."
"No moving parts," Bill said.
"Ours went loony on the way out. Gave us a hell of a time."
"Guess it could happen," Bill said. "You'd have to destealth and call Mayday."
He laughed. "Just tell them you're Dallas Barr; you'll get plenty of help."
For the next hour and a half, the three of them prowled around the ship,
making sure Dallas knew what to do in case this or that came up. They had to
consult the manual for most of the emergency procedures, since the worst that
had ever happened to them was an ullage problem in the drinking-water tanks
that made the faucets hiss and spit in microgravity.
Luanne Duncan was a pleasantly batty Scotswoman who baked scones and made
"proper tea" for them, no easy trick on an asteroid barely a kilometer wide.
It would take an hour for a dropped sugar cube to hit the ground.
Dallas let the Barons visit while he unloaded the silver. It was a tedious
process since he had to use an
EVA chair in the virtual absence of gravity: fill your lap up with rocks, then
give it a little burst to move out of the hold, wait two seconds, then a
counterbalancing burst, then a slow rotation; when you reach
180 degrees, gently throw the rocks downward; come back around, stop the
rotation, small burst to go back to the hold. That was the pattern when
everything went perfectly, which happened about two trips out of a hundred.
The bright chunks of silver were rather conspicuous against the dark magnetic
hoarfrost of iron-nickel particles that clung to the asteroid's surface like
fur. Dallas draped the black Kevlar blanket over the pile, battened down the
hatches, and collected his hosts.
Page 137
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Bill rode the floor on the way back while Dallas "piloted," though piloting
was nothing more than being careful in explaining to the spaceship what you
wanted it to do.
GO BACK TOWARD CERES, ACCELERATION NOT TO EXCEED ONE GEE, MATCH ORBIT WITH
SORF, UNSTEALTH 500 KILOMETERS FROM SORF.
If the stealthing was still turned on too near the Synchronous Orbit Repair
Facility or any other place with guidance and communication equipment, it
could interfere in dozens of frequencies. Not especially stealthy at close
range.
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BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman
Dallas put the Barons on the shuttle along with all of the expensive leftover
wine from Fireball. It would be a long month back to Earth, he said, but he
wanted to arrive sober and mean.
He didn't know what a long month was.
MARIA
We kept rotating and bouncing off the walls. Once each six months or so I
would come close enough to the console to read the numbers, which I assumed
were estimated time to deceleration. That gave me an objective measure of the
time stretch: it took about a minute for each tenth-of-a-second number to
change, so we were slowed by a factor of about six hundred. It took me several
rotations to figure that out; arithmetic was just plain not there for me; I
had to go through a tortuous chain of logical inference to come up with that
number. We'd gone halfway to Earth this second time I'd been zombied; two
weeks divided by six hundred comes to what? Or was it times six hundred, or
plus or minus, or to the six-
hundredth power? I knew the words but couldn't make them produce any new
numbers.
It was frustrating, but only frustrating. I got through the last long wait and
I would get through this one.
It occurred to me that given as much time as I had, perhaps I could reinvent
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Dobre pomysły nie mają przeszłości, mają tylko przyszłość. Robert Mallet
De minimis - o najmniejszych rzeczach.
Dobroć jest ważniejsza niż mądrość, a uznanie tej prawdy to pierwszy krok do mądrości. Theodore Isaac Rubin
Dobro to tylko to, co szlachetne, zło to tylko to, co haniebne.
Dla człowieka nie tylko świat otaczający jest zagadką; jest on nią sam dla siebie. I z obu tajemnic bardziej dręczącą wydaje się ta druga. Antoni Kępiński (1918-1972)
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