"Who's Afraid Of Wolf 359" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

УWell, thatТs it,Ф I said. УProblem solved. The systems pretty much uninнhabitable now, with all the mass and organics locked up in a planet, but it may have tourist potential. No threat to anyone. Call in a seedship. They can make something of whatТs left of the local Kuiper belt, and get the Long Tubes back on stream. Wake me up when itТs over.Ф

УThat is very much not it,Ф said the box. УNot until we know why this happened. Not until we know whatТs down there.Ф

УWell, send down some probes.Ф

УI do not have the facilities to make firewalled snoop robots,Ф said the box, Уand other probes could be corrupted. My instructions are to deliver you to any remnant of the Wolf 359 civilization, and that is what I shall do.Ф

It must have been an illusion, given what I could read of our velocity, but the planet seemed to come closer.

УYouТre proposing to dockЧto land on that object?Ф

УYes.Ф

УIt has an atmosphere! WeТll burn up! And then crash!Ф

УThe remains of our propulsion system can be adapted for aerobraking,Ф said the box.

УThat would have to be ridiculously finely calculated.Ф

УIt would,Ф said the box. УPlease do not distract me.Ф

Call me sentimental, but when the boxТs Turing functionality shut down to free up processing power for these ridiculously fine calculations, I felt lonely. The orbital insertion took fourteen hours. I drank hot coffee and sucked, from another nipple, some tepid but nutritious and palatable glop. I even slept, in my first real sleep for more than half a century. I was awakнened by the jolt as the box spent the last of its fuel and reaction mass on the clipperТs final course correction. The planet was a blue arc of atmosphere beneath me, the interstellar propulsion plate a heat shield in front, and the deceleration shell a still-folded drogue behind. The locations were illuнsoryЧrelative to the clipper I was flat on my back. The first buffeting from our passage through the upper atmosphere coincided with an increasing sense of weight. The heat shield flared. Red-hot air rushed past. The weight became crushing. The improvised heat shield abraded, then exploded, its parts flicked away behind. The drogue deployed with a bang and a jolt that almost blacked me out. The surface became a landscape, then a land, then a wall of trees. The clipper sliced and shuddered through them, for seconds on end of crashes and shaking. It plowed a long furrow across green-covered soil and halted in a cloud of smoke and steam.

УThat was a landing,Ф said the box.

УYes,Ф I said. УYou might have tried to avoid the trees.Ф

УI could not,Ф said the box. УPhytobraking was integral to my projected landing schedule.Ф

УPhytobraking,Ф I said.

УYes. Also, the impacted cellulose can be used to spin you a garment.Ф

That took a few minutes. Sticky stuff oozed from the box and hardened around me. When the uncomfortable process finished, I had a one-piece coverall and boots.

УConditions outside are tolerable,Ф said the box, Уwith no immediate hazards.Ф

The box moved. The lid retracted. I saw purple sky and white clouds above me. Resisting an unease that I later identified as agoraphobia, I sat up. I found myself at the rear of the clippers pointed wedge shape, about ten meters above the ground and fifty meters from the shipТs nose. The view was disorienting. It was like being in a gigantic landscaped habitat, with the substrate curving the wrong way. Wolf 359 hung in the sky like a vast red balloon, above the straight edge of a flat violet-tinged expanse that, with some incredulity, I recognized as an immense quantity of water. It met the solid substrate about a kilometer away. A little to my left, an open channel of water flowed toward the larger body. The landscape was uneven, in parts jagged, with bare rock protruding from the vegetation cover. The plain across which our smoking trail stretched to broken trees was the flatнtest piece of ground in the vicinity. On the horizon, I could see a range of very high ground, dominated by a conical mass from whose truncated top smoke drifted.

The most unusual and encouraging feature of the landscape, however, was the score or so of plainly artificial and metallic gnarly lumps scattered across it. The system had had at least a million habitats in its heyday; these were some of their wrecks. Smoke rose from most of them, including the nearest, which stuck up about twenty meters from the ground, about fifteen hundred meters away.

УYou can talk to my head?Ф I asked the ship. УYou can see what I see?Ф

УYes,Ф it said, in my head.

I climbed down and struck out across the rough ground.

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