The year 2002.
The ship was in free flight for only thirty days, and David Bowman sometimes did not believe that he ever knew any other life, except for existence in the closed world of Discovery. All the years of study, all the previous flights to the moon and Mars were like the property of another person, the events of someone else's life.
About the same thing Frank Poole experienced. He has repeatedly jokingly mourned that the nearest psychiatrist is almost a hundred million miles away. Meanwhile, this sense of isolation and alienation experienced by astronauts was quite understandable and did not mean deviation from the mental norm. It's just that in half a century when mankind first tried to escape into space, nobody had ever undertaken such a flight.
Five years ago, the preparation for the flight called Project Jupiter began - it was planned as the first controlled flight to this greatest of the planets with a return to Earth. The ship was almost ready for a two-year space flight when the task of the flight was suddenly changed.
Discovery was still flying towards Jupiter, but that was no longer its ultimate goal. The crew was instructed not to reduce the speed at the intersection of the Jupiter satellite system, which stretches over vast areas. On the contrary, it was supposed to use the gravitational field of this of the giant world as a sling that would throw the Discovery even further away from the sun. To the far edge of the Solar System. To Pluto.
Discovery One - like all long-range spacefaring ships - could not enter the atmosphere or resist the full gravity of any planet - it was too fragile and unbridled for that. It was collected in near-Earth orbit, tested in a test flight in space beyond the Moon and finally tested in circumnavigational orbit.
It was the creation of a clean space, and this was visible at first glance.
A sealed sphere, reinforced on a fairly lightweight structure about a hundred meters long, served as the head of the ship.
Immediately behind the sealed sphere were four large tanks of liquid methane, followed by Y-shaped openwork radiator planes that dissipated the excess heat of the nuclear reactor. Covered in a mesh of thin tubes carrying coolant, they resembled the wings of a giant dragonfly, and from the outside, from a certain angle of view, the Discovery was something like an ancient sailing ship.
Where the radiator wings ran out, ninety meters from the residential sphere, there was a shielded hell of the reactor and engine nozzles, from which the heated starry substance - plasma - burst out. The main task of the ship's engine was performed a few weeks ago when the Discovery was launched from its moonlit berth. Now the reactor worked "at low revolutions", supplying electricity to the ship's system, and huge planes of radiators, which at maximum thrust, when the "Discovery" was gaining speed, heated red, now were black and cold.
The total length of the Discovery was about a hundred and twenty meters, but the small world, where his crew actually lived, was limited to a twelve-meter spherical hermetic hull, covered with a thick layer of plastic armor. Here, under the protection of cosmic rays, all life support systems, and control room - the working heart of the ship - were located. Below was a small "space garage" with three single-seat jet capsules - they could be through special locks to go into space when you need to perform some work outside the ship.
In the equatorial belt of the sealed sphere, in a layer limited by analogy with the Earth tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, was mounted slowly rotating drum diameter of about ten and a half meters. Performing one revolution in ten seconds, this kind of centrifuge, created artificial gravity, approximately equal to the moonlight. Such gravity was already sufficient to avoid physical atrophy, which could arise from a long stay in weightlessness, it also allowed sending vital functions in normal or almost normal conditions. That's why this was the carousel that housed the galley, shower, and toilet.
Only here was it possible to prepare and drink hot drinks, which are quite dangerous when they are weightless - you can get severe burns from bubbles of boiling water floating in the air. The problem of shaving was solved here as well: shaved bristles scattered and clogged the air, threatening the health of people and electrical equipment. Along the perimeter of the carousel were arranged five tiny cabins, equipped with astronauts of their own taste, there were also their personal belongings. So far, only Bowman and Poole have used their cabins: the future residents of the rest of the cabins were still sleeping in electronic sarcophagi in the cell next door.
If necessary, the merry-go-round could be stopped.
