"Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - Spirals" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

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SPIRALS


by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle


There are always people who want to revise history. No hero is so great that someone wonтАЩt
take a shot at him. Not even Jack Halfey.
Yes, I knew Jack Halfey. You may not remember my name. But in the main airlock of
industrial Station One thereтАЩs an inscribed block of industrial diamond, and my name is sixth
down: Cornelius L. Riggs, Metallurgist. And you might have seen my face at the funeral.
You mast remember the funeral. All across the solar system work stopped while Jack Halfey
took his final trek into the sun. He wanted it that way, and no spacer was going to refuse Jack
HalfeyтАЩs last request, no matter how expensive it might be. Even the downers got in the act. They
didnтАЩt help pay the cost, but they spent hundreds of millions on sending reporters and cameras to
the Moon..
That funeral damned near killed me. The kids who took me to the Moon werenтАЩt supposed to
let the ship take more than half a gravity. My bones are over a hundred years old, and theyтАЩre
fragile. For that young squirt of a pilot the landing may have been smooth, but she hit a full gee
for a second there, and I thought my time had come.
I had to go, of course. The records say I was JackтАЩs best friend, the man whoтАЩd saved his
life, and being one of the last survivors of the Great Trek makes me somebody special. Noth ing
would do but that I push the button to send Jack on his тАЬfinal spiral into the sun.тАЭ to quote a
downer reporter.
I still see TriVee programs about ships тАЬspiralingтАЭ into the sun. YouтАЩd think seventy
yeals and more after the Great Trek the schools would teach kids something about space.
When I staggered outside in lunar gravityтАФlighter than the 20% gravity we keep in the
Skylark. just enough to feel the differenceтАФthe reporters were all over me. Why, they demanded,
did Jack want to go into the sun? Cremation and scattering of ashes is good enough for most
spacers. It was good enough for JackтАЩs wife. Some send their ashes back to Earth; some are
scattered into the solar wind, to be flung throughout the universe; some prefer to go back into
the soil of a colony sphere. But why the sun?
IтАЩve wondered myself. I never was good at reading JackтАЩs mind. The question that nearly
drove me crazy, and did drive me to murder, was: why did Jack Halfey make the Great Trek in the
first place?
I finally did learn the answer to that one. Be patient.

Probably there will never be another funeral like JackтАЩs. The Big Push is only a third
finished, and itтАЩs still two hundred miles of the biggest linear accelerator ever built, an
electronicpowered railway crawling across the Earthside face of the Moon. One day weтАЩll use it to
launch starships. WeтАЩll fire when the Moon is full, to add the EarthтАЩs and MoonтАЩs orbital
velocities to the speed of the starship, and to give the downers a thrill. But we launched Jack
when the Moon was new, with precisely enough velocity to cancel the EarthтАЩs orbital speed of
eighteen miles per second, It would have cost less to send him into interstellar space.
Jack didnтАЩt drop in any spiral. The Earth went on and the coffin stayed behind, then it