"Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - Lucifer ' s Hammer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

COMET WARDENS, a Southern California religious group

MAJOR BENNET ROSTEN, USAF, Minuteman Squadron Commander

MRS. MARIE VANCE, wife of Gordon Vance

HARRY STIMMS, automobile dealer in Tujunga, California

CORPORAL ROGER GILLINGS, Army

SERGEANT THOMAS HOOKER, Army

MARTY ROBBINS, Tim Hamner's assistant and caretaker

JASON GILLCUDDY, writer

HUGO BECK, owner of a commune in the foothills of the High Sierra

Prologue

Before the sun burned, before the planets formed, there were chaos and the comets.

Chaos was a local thickening in the interstellar medium. Its mass was great enough to attract
itself, to hold itself, and it thickened further. Eddies formed. Particles of dust and frozen gas
drifted together, and touched, and clung. Flakes formed, and then loose snowballs of frozen gases.
Over the ages a whirlpool pattern developed, a fifth of a light year across. The center contracted
further. Local eddies, whirling frantically near the center of the storm, collapsed to form
planets.

It formed as a cloud of snow, far from the whirlpool's axis. Ices joined the swarm, but slowly,
slowly, a few molecules at a time. Methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide; and sometimes denser objects
struck it and embedded themselves, so that it held rocks, and iron. Now it was a single stable
mass. Other ices formed, chemicals that could only be stable in the interstellar cold.

It was four miles across when the disaster came.

The end was sudden. In no more than fifty years, the wink of an eye in its lifetime, the
whirlpool's center collapsed. A new sun burned fearfully bright.

Myriads of comets flashed to vapor in that hellish flame Planets lost their atmospheres. A great
wind of light pressure stripped an the loose gas and dust from the inner system and hurled it at
the stars.

It hardly noticed. It was two hundred times as far from the sun as the newly formed planet
Neptune. The new sun was no more than an uncommonly bright star, gradually dimming now.

Down in the maelstrom there was frantic activity. Gases boiled out of the rocks of the inner
system. Complex chemicals developed in the seas of the third planet. Endless hurricanes boded
across and within the gas giant worlds. The inner worlds would never know calm.