"Geoffrey A. Landis - The Man in the Mirror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

тАЬSonnabitch,тАЭ he said. тАЬColder than a loan sharkтАЩs heart.тАЭ

His meter wasnтАЩt broken; he checked a patch of the crusty snow
surrounding the pit, and got the right number, thirty Kelvin. The surface of
Sedna was colder than the caves of hell, but the temperature of the black
surface was twenty-five degrees cooler yet, far lower than it had any right to
be.

Slowly, he worked it out. The surface was not black; it was reflective,
and only appeared black in that it was reflecting the starry sky. It must be
very close to a perfect mirror indeed. Far as they were from the Sun, the
snows of Sedna still absorbed sunlight, and that heated them a few
degrees above absolute. But this perfect reflector must absorb no light at
all and stay cold. Somewhere in the far infrared, it must radiate away a tiny
amount of heat, he realized, but in all the wavelengths in which the Sun
shone, it absorbed nothing, and so was colder than the surface it sat on.

It was an enormous concave mirror. A giant telescope, miles in
diameterтАФbuilt for what purpose?

Lee stared out across it, marveling. It showed no signs of age, but
certainly it must be ancient. Who had made it, and when? Sedna was one
of the more eccentric objects in the solar systemтАЩs Kuiper belt, a dwarf
world in a long slow orbit that took it to a farthest point nearly a thousand
astronomical units from the Sun, barely bound to the Sun at all. Probably it
had once been an interstellar wanderer, captured by the Sun millions or
even billions of years ago from the cold darkness between the stars.
Where had it come from? What unknown race had built such a gargantuan
telescope mirror, and for what purpose?

He leaned over to put his faceplate right against the mirror surface,
steadying himself with one hand carefully wrapped around the taut safety
line. The surface was perfectly smooth, perfectly reflective.

And suddenly the line was slack.

He stood up and saw the snowcat looming toward him in the
darkness. He had anchored the cat against a hummock of ice, but waste
heat from the reactor had melted it free, and it lurched downhill now,
staggering drunkenly toward him. Without thinking, he took a step back
away from it.

He realized his error instantly. His cleated boots found no purchase,
the surface of the mirror slicker than ice, and his feet shot out from under
him. He reached out wildly as he fell. In the low gravity, everything
happened in slow motion. With one hand, he grabbed onto the toolpack he
had set down on the edge. For a moment he hovered there, on his belly,
his feet dangling down the slope of the enormous mirror, hanging on with
his left hand clutching the toolpack on the edge of the slope, the right still