"Haldeman, Joe - Seven and the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

"Well, that's one way to handle it. A good way, usually, if you do it convincingly. But even if I don't actually describe it in detail, I'd like to know how it works, what it looks like."
"A black box, probably." He leaned back and thought for a minute. "There is an angle. You know how to make artificial gravity?"
"Sure, you spin the thing aroundЧ"
"No, that's not gravity. It's just imposing a rotating frame of reference. If you drop something it doesn't fall in a straight line. It doesn't even drop, really. It only seems to."
"Okay." I think.
"The only way we know how to make artificial gravity is to put a mass under the thing. You put a scale on a table and put something on it that weighs a pound. Roll a ten-ton lead weight under the table, and it weighs a tiny fraction of an ounce more."
"That's not really artificial gravity, though," I said. "That's natural, organic gravity."
"Semantics. Don't think of that block of lead in Newtonian termsЧmore mass, therefore a greater attractive force. Don't think in terms of force at all. Think of it as a device that changes the shape of space." He stood up quickly. "Let's go to the undergraduate lab."
I followed him through the door and down the hall. "You know about the rubber sheet model?"
"I've seen pictures."
"We have one here. Here." He pushed open a door and we went into a large room full of long tables cluttered with electronic gear. In one corner was a round table a couple of yards in diameter, a taut rubber sheet nailed to a wooden frame with a wooden lip around it. Lazio reached into a jar and took out a marble-sized ball bearing and rolled it across the sheet.
"Straight lines, see?" The ball bearing bounced from the opposite side and came back. Lazio picked it up. "Now we put a planet in there, or a sun." He filled his hand with a metal sphere about half the size of a bowling ball and set it in the center of the sheet, turning it into a kind of elastic bowl.
"We use this thing to demonstrate different kinds of orbits." He rolled the ball bearing out and it dipped down in a graceful curve, came out banking to the left, rolled back in, and began looping around in a series of ellipses. He scooped up a handful of the ball bearings and rolled them in at various angles and speeds. "See there, there, that one's almost a circle, like the earth's orbit."
"Kind of a miniature solar system," I said.
"Except that it runs down. Friction with the air and the rubber surface."
It was a hypnotic sight. We watched them whispering around for a minute.
"Now the important thing is that these things are still moving in a kind of straight line, though it doesn't look like it from our point of view."
"Path of least resistance?" I said.
"Something like that. The path they follow is called a geodesic. How much it deviates from a simple straight line, obviously, depends on how massive the central object is and how far it is from the orbiting object."
"The closer they get, the faster they roll," I said. "Then they go out again and slow down."
"Right. Now what we're actually talking about, at any given moment, is the angle the rubber sheet makes, from the horizontal, at the spot right under the ball bearing. The greater the angle is, the more the ball's influenced."
"Sure." Pretty sure, anyhow.
"That angle corresponds to what in four-dimensional space-time we call the gravitational gradient."
"If you say so."
"Come on, now, it's not that hard. You read the black hole paper, didn't you?"
Moment of truth. "Look. Dr. Crane, twenty years ago I flunked calculus and switched to English. The part of your paper that was in English, I read."
He twisted his beard. "Not much, eh?"
"Enough to see that you might have what I want. Go ahead. The gravitational gradient."
"Well, what's interesting in terms of your space drive is what happens to the gravitational gradient very close to a tremendously massive, very small object. Like a black hole."
He pulled the weight out of the middle of the sheet and the ball bearings sort of relaxed, rolling off and clicking against the sides of the table and each other.
"Now look." He pushed his finger down into the sheet and one ball bearing, the closest, rolled into the dimple he made. None of the others was affected. "If you think about the push being the same, here, but the scale much reducedЧthe ball is smaller than a BB and my finger is narrower than a hypodermic needleЧyou can see you're approaching a condition where the sides of the gravity well, the rubber sheet, are almost vertical. As it approaches the point of the needle, the BB falls faster and faster."
"But not for long."
"That's the point. It's like rolling the lead weight under the scale. I think I have a way to fool space-time. Make it seem as if there were a small black hole just a tiny distance away, constantly retreating in the direction you want to go. It's only the gradient that makes a difference, not the overall situation." He poked the rubber sheet again. "See? The other ball bearings don't even know I'm here. The gradient becomes infinitesimal, out where they are."
"Suppose it were a spaceship-sized thing. Wouldn't the gee forces get intolerable?"
"Not a bit. You're in free fall, just like orbiting a planet. Zero gravity, to the people aboard the spaceship."
"You couldn't go any faster than the speed of light, though," I said. "It doesn't get by relativity."
He picked up a ball bearing and stared at it, frowning. "I'd have to say no." He tossed it onto the sheet and it bounced over the lip to rattle across the floor. "Certainly within the context of my paper, I didn't say anything about exceeding the speed of light. I did want to get it published."
"You saw a catch to it?"
"There's a paradox . . . having to do with the allowable range of initial conditions. I'm waiting to see whether anybody notices it." He gestured at the rubber sheet. "If you were to interpret the paradox in terms of this model, well, it would be like changing the elasticity of the rubber, at the point where the BB is. Or being able to reach up from the other side of the sheet and twist it out of shape.
"The net result, looking at it one way, is that it goes faster than the speed of light. Another way to look at it, which is no more comfortable, is that . . . well, it shrinks space. Like your black box, it makes distances shorter. You accelerate for a certain periodЧfalling, so to speakЧand then reverse the process, decelerating, and you wind up having gone much farther than you seem to have gone. Much farther than you should be able to go, on the energy expended."
That was enough for me. "Would you be willing to explain this to some friends of mineЧother people who are helping me with this thing?"
He shook his head. "I don't want any publicity:"
"Nothing like that. They aren't even writers. We'd just get together for dinner and chat."
The word "dinner" provoked some interest. Science fiction writers and junior professors have something in common. "They aren't a bunch of nuts, now?"
"One of them is pretty weirdЧbut levelheaded." Flat on top, actually. "You might get a kick out of him. He's even taller than you are."
"That would be novel. Okay, go ahead and set it up. I'm free most nights."
I called Lydia from his phone and set it up for that evening, then went off to my local check-bouncing service to get enough for our train fares.


I don't recall now what I actually expected in the way of a reaction, when Lazlo Crane confronted Seven. He was remarkably subdued.