"C. Sanford Lowe & G. David Nordley - Loki's Realm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lowe C Sanford)

LOKIтАЩS REALM
by C. SANFORD LOWE & G. DAVID NORDLEY

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Illustrated by William Warren

Engineers must work with what they have....

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Chapter 1
Broadford, Isle of Skye, Scotland,
12 March 2260
I suppose itтАЩs more interesting when, in the words of Robert Burns, тАЬthe best
laid schemes oтАЩ mice anтАЩ men gang aft agleyтАЭ than otherwise. IтАЩll have no quarrel
with that, though I do have to say that, had everything gone according to plan, it still
would have been quite an adventure. IтАЩm Bruce Macready, historian of the Epsilon
Eridani mission to build and launch one of the four impactors of the Black Hole
Project.
The idea of the BHP was to accelerate four billion-ton iron-rod impactors
from four different stars up to relativistic velocities, then crash them together to
generate a pressure at their meeting point that far exceeds what even quantum
mechanics can resist, the result being a miniature black hole. Though smaller than an
atomic nucleus, it would mass a billion tons or soтАФenough to stay around long
enough for the physicists to play with it and someday, perhaps, use its progeny to
construct vast Faustian machines that would manipulate the very fabric of space
itself to humanityтАЩs purposes.
Aye, that was the hope.
How, you might ask, did a Scottish professor, who had not left the Isle of
Skye more than a half dozen times in his 147 yearsтАФlet alone go into space
тАФbecome involved in this? Well, I had taught the history of science and technology
at Broadford College for over half its existence, and held every position including
chancellor at one time or another. I thought the human race was in a flat place of late,
not making history like it had done before. Earth was pacified. Mars was nearly
terraformed, and it would be centuries before Venus followed suit. So I sensed that,
short of the possibility of alien contact, the BHP would be the signal event of this
era.
I found that among the BHP principal investigators was one Bradford Adams,
an Australian physicist who had attended Broadford for a year on exchange and had
taken one of my classes. Year after year, in explaining our expansion into space, I
unleashed the words of Tsiolkovsky to thunder down on Brad and my other
students, telling them that one could not live in a cradle forever. Now he spoke to
me.
I took it on myself to contact Brad and offer my services as an historian on
the fifty-year expedition to Epsilon EridaniтАФa star about a third of the SunтАЩs
luminosity, which, due to its extreme youth, was not suitable for a colony and thus
had no indigenous historians. To my great surprise, the project leader, Dr. Zhau Tse