"Murray Leinster - First Contact (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

look in and see the first nonhuman civilized beings that any man had ever looked upon.
But what he saw was simply a flat plate on which thin red glows crawled here and there in
seeming aimlessness. His helmet phones emitted a startled exclamation. The skipperтАЩs voice:
тАЬVery good, Mr. Dort. Fix your scanner to look into that plate. They dumped out a robot
with an infra-red visiplate for communication. Not risking any personnel. Whatever we might do
would damage only machinery. Maybe they expect us to bring it on boardтАФand it may have a bomb
charge that can be detonated when theyтАЩre ready to start for home. IтАЩll send a plate to face one
of its scanners. You return to the ship.тАЭ
тАЬYes, sir,тАЭ said Tommy. тАЬBut which way is the ship, sir?тАЭ
There were no stars. The nebula obscured them with its light The only thing visible from
the robot was the double star at the nebulaтАЩs center. Tommy was no longer oriented. He had but one
reference point.
тАЬHead straight away from the double star,тАЭ came the order in his helmet phone. тАЬWeтАЩll pick
you up.тАЭ
He passed another lonely figure, a little later, headed for the alien sphere with a vision
plate to set up. The two spaceships, each knowing that it dared not risk its own race by the
slightest lack of caution, would communicate with each other through this small round robot. Their
separate vision systems would enable them to exchange all the information they dared give, while
they debated the most practical way of making sure that their own civilization would not be
endangered by this first contact with another. The truly most practical method would be the
destruction of the other ship in a, swift and deadly attack in self-defense.

- The Lianvabon, thereafter, was a ship in which there were two separate enterprises on
hand at the same time. She had come out from Earth to make close-range observations on the smaller
component of the double star at the nebulaтАЩs center. The nebula itself was the result of the most
titanic explosion of which men have, any knowledge. The explosion took place some time in the year
2946 B.C., before the first of the seven cities of long-dead Ilium was even thought of. The light


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of that explosion reached Earth in the year 1054 A.D., and was duly recorded in ecclesiastical
annals and somewhat more reliably by Chinese court astronomers. It was bright enough to be seen in
daylight for twenty-three successive days. Its lightтАФand it was four thousand light-years awayтАФwas
brighter than that of Venus.
From these facts, astronomers could calculate nine hundred years later the violence of the
detonation. Matter blown away from the center of the explosion would have traveled outward at the
rate of two million, three hundred thousand miles an hour; more than thirty-eight thousand miles a
minute; something over six hundred thirty-eight miles per second. When twentieth-century
telescopes were turned upon the scene of this vast explosion, only a double star remainedтАФand the
nebula. The brighter star of the doublet was almost unique in having so high a surface temperature
that it showed no spectrum lines at all. It had a continuous spectrum. SolтАЩs surface temperature
is about 7,0000 Absolute. That of the hot white star is 500,000 degrees. It has nearly the mass of
the sun, but only one fifth its diameter, so that its density is one hundred seventy-three times
that of water, sixteen times that of lead, and eight times that of iridiumтАФthe heaviest substance
known on Earth. But even this density is not that of a dwarf white star like the companion of
Sirius. The white star in the Crab Nebula is an incomplete dwarf; it is a star still in the act of
collapsing. ExaminationтАФincluding the survey of a four-thousand-year column of its lightтАФwas
worthwhile. The Lianvabon had come to make that examination. But the finding of an alien spaceship