It's a pity Floyd wasn't attracted either as an expert or as an official, not at all. Even his application for resettlement was not considered. So the project to settle Terra-Nova passed by him.
Although, of course, his old body may not have survived the colonist anabiosis. Unlike the soft hypobiosis of astronauts, which had already learned to conduct easily, quickly, and almost without consequences - a slight slowdown in aging does not count - the anabiosis, turning into a frozen ice cap, was much more complex, serious, long, and, no, not dangerous, but seriously hitting the body process.
Young people, colonists, experienced such a shock and recovered quite quickly - and he, the old man, was already contraindicated even to descend to the planet.
Moreover, Terra Nova was not such a promised planet at a closer look - it was too hot on the equator and in the tropics of the planet, it was possible to live only near the poles, and the resources were located in the equatorial zones. But the information in sufficient quantity has been collected only after start of "Ark" so colonists already were there, and chances to change a globe once again at them were not present. At least everyone had it at once. Still, Universe ships under construction at the liberated shipyards were to become interstellar couriers. And also by transports, scouts, researchers - "Universe" were really universal.
And it was necessary to use the newly built system of launching into space with full payback in order to recoup the costs - or even to prevent them from being wasted. And Pluto and Arcturus' automatic refueling stations shouldn't be idle either. And you have to let the industrialists and miners make money. And hundreds of other things to do.
And all this passed by Heywood Floyd, a former astronomer, a former U.S. State Department official, born 1968.
The Skype call signal was suddenly loud. Floyd wriggled and answered. From the screen looked at him, unknown official.
- Dr. Floyd, would you like to take a closer look at the newest ship?
- Universe X, the last ship in the "star" series built to date, was not too different from Discovery One, which started almost exactly half a century ago. There were no revolutions in the technology of building spaceships - the same, only more advanced, nuclear reactors and plasma engines gave the ship energy and the ability to fly, and just as astronauts lived in a centrifuge drum that gave them almost normal gravity.
However, there were also some differences.
- Axis - fuselage or keel, as pilots or ships would say - the ship was, as usual, a thin corporate design. On one end of the axis, there was a box of reactor-motor block, on the other - inhabited compartment in the form of a torus, and the axis of the ship lay in the plane of this torus, instead of being perpendicular to it.
Floyd once heard at the edge of his ear that the alignment of the centrifuge axis parallel to the long axis of Discovery One led to unpleasant maneuvers - the inhabited compartment showed the long-known but unexpected properties of the gyroscope. Frank Poole, then the ship's manager, coped brilliantly with the problem by stopping the rotation and completing the maneuver, and scrupulously wrote about it to Earth. In the "Universe" series this feature was for the benefit of the ship - now it was possible to turn the ship without wasting fuel, only speeding up, slowing down or deflecting the rotation of the inhabited compartment. In long-range space missions, this was a very valuable quality - not to spend such valuable fuel on ongoing operations.
In addition, as the reconnaissance machines that map planetary systems accessible through the interstellar catapult transport network have shown, sometimes cosmic rays can be much stronger than usual, and the usual protection of inhabited compartments for them is that of cigarette paper. Therefore, the Universe torus was covered by an invisible magnetic field film that deflected the cosmic rays and was harmless to the spacecraft by allowing them to pass through the sides of the spacecraft and through the center hole. Arrangement of a torus sideways in the direction of a course in such variant was more favorable because it allowed reducing frontal resistance of a magnetic field during flight.
- The Universe Ten was now unloaded, so there were no freight containers between the radiator petals and in the middle of the working body tank cylinders. The paired rods of external devices, with antennas and telescopes, were sticking out of the ship's fuselage - a small price to pay for giving up the general sphere of Discovery, in which all these "eyes" and "ears" of the ship got along peacefully.
The shuttle that took Floyd from Station 6 to Ibrium's space shipyards near the moon slowly sailed past the ship, giving him the opportunity to see all the small details. This made the doctor laugh spontaneously as if the parrotfish were sailing past a coral reef, looking for a place to hide.