"Larry Niven - A World Out of Time v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

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Copyright (c) 1976 by Larry Niven

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

Published simultaneously in Canada by Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada, Limited.

A somewhat different version of the first chapter of this book appeared in Galaxy
magazine, November 1971, as a story entitled "Rammer," copyright (c) 1971 by
UPD Publishing Corporation. Other selections from the novel were serialized in
Galaxy magazine in 1976, copyright (c) 1976 by UPD Publishing Corporation.

Two verses from "Little Teeny Eyes" have been included with permission from the author, Tom Digby.

Printed in the United States of America
To Owen Lock and Judy-Lynn del Rey, who edited the manuscript of this book and made me do some necessary rewriting: Where the hell were you when Ringworld was published?
To anyone who owns a first edition of Ringworld: Hang on to that. It's the only version in which the Earth rotates in the wrong direction (Chapter 1).

CHAPTER 1 RAMMER

I
Once there was a dead man.
He had been waiting for two hundred years inside a coffin, suitably labeled, whose outer shell held liquid nitrogen. There were frozen clumps of cancer all through his frozen body. He had had it bad.
He was waiting for medical science to find him a cure.
He waited in vain. Most varieties of cancer could be cured now, but no cure existed for the billions of cell walls ruptured by expanding crystals of ice. He had known the risk. He had gambled anyway. Why not? He'd been dying.
The vaults held over a million of these frozen bodies. Why not? They'd been dying.

Later there came a young criminal. His name is forgotten and his crime is secret, but it must have been a terrible one. The State wiped his personality for it.
Afterward he was a dead man: still warm, still breathing, even reasonably healthy-but empty.
The State had use for an empty man.
Corbell woke on a hard table, aching as if he had slept too long in one position. He stared incuriously at a white ceiling. Memories floated up to him of a double-wailed coffin, and sleep and pain.
The pain was gone.
He sat up at once.
And flapped his arms wildly for balance. Everything felt wrong. His arms would not swing right. His body was too light. His head bobbed strangely on a thin neck. He reached frantically for the nearest support, which turned out to be a blond young man in a white jumpsuit. Corbell missed his grip; his arms were shorter than he had expected. He toppled on his side, shook his head and sat up more carefully.
His arms. Scrawny, knobby-and not his.
The man in the jumpsuit said, "Are you all right?"
"Yeah," said Corbell. My God, what have they done to me? I thought I wa~s ready for anything, but this- He fought rising panic. His throat was rusty, but that was all right. This was certainly somebody else's body, but it didn't seem to have cancer, either. "What's the date? How long has it been?"
A quick recovery. The checker gave him a plus. "Twenty-one ninety, your dating. You won't have to worry about our dating."
That sounded ominous. Cautiously Corbell postponed the obvious next question: What's happened to me? and asked instead, "Why not?"
"You won't be joining our society."
"No? What, then?"
"Several professions are open to you-a limited choice. If you don't qualify for any of them we'll try someone else."
Corbell sat on the edge of the hard operating table. His body seemed younger, more limber, definitely thinner, not very clean. He was acutely aware that his abdomen did not hurt no matter how he moved.
He asked, "And what happens to me?"
"I've never learned how to answer that question. Call it a problem in metaphysics," said the checker. "Let me detail what's happened to you so far and then you can decide for yourself."

There was an empty man. Still breathing and as healthy as most of society in the year 2190. But empty. The electrical patterns in the
brain, the worn paths of nervous reflex, the memories, the person had all been wiped away as penalty for an unnamed crime.