《The Honeyearthers》作者： - Robert F. Young【EPUB】

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Not often does a science-fiction writer essay a love story. This is, in many ways, a love story. Of a man for a son, of a man for a woman, of a man for lost worlds and space and time. And of a woman's love for courage. The HoneyEarthers by Robert F. Young Illustrated by SCHELLING And Absalom rode upon a mule, and the mule went under the thick boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak, and he was taken up between the heaven and the earth;. and the mule that was under him went away. —2 Samuel 18:9 T HE kid thrilled as the first ice-grapnel hurtled forth from the Ganymede's belly gun and sank its giant fingers into the orbiting floe. The other members of the grapnel crew stood by indifferently, their faces stolid behind the visi-visors of their helmets; but the kid was only fifteen and this was his first trip to the rings, and for him there was magic in every moment of the day and night. The floe gave a slight shudder when the belly-gun crew tautened the grapnel cable, but it did not deviate from its orbit. The ring floes ranged in size from the dimensions of a medium-sized mountain. This one was as large as a hill—as large, in fact, as the great green hill that rose beyond the junior citizen's home that the kid had run away from before lying about his age and getting a job as an apprentice grapnelman with one of the waterlanes companies. Unlike the orphanage hill, however, the floe wasn't green. It was gray. The Ganymede's belly gun spoke again, and a second grapnel leaped through the glinting mist of ice particles that fringed the rings, and found the floe. Again, the floe shuddered when the cable slack was taken up; again, it remained true to its orbit. Beyond it, and before and behind and "below" and "above" it—and as far as the eye could see—other floes marched in the awesome orbital parade that had brought Saturn fame and Earthmen fortunes. A third grapnel found its mark. A fourth and a fifth and a sixth. Now the time had come for the grapnel crew to go into action. The kid checked his knee-crampons, made certain that his ice- hook was within easy reach of his left hand. In his bulky spacesuit he felt as big and as capable as the other members of the crew. With them, he descended the six steel ladders that ran down the floe freighter's hull to the cable apertures, and with them