"Larry Niven - All the Bridges Rusting v1.0 italics" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

All the Bridges Rusting


Take a point in space.
Take a specific point near the star system Alpha Centaurus, on the line linking the center of mass of that system with Sol. Follow it as it moves toward Sol system at lightspeed. We presume a particle in this point.
Men who deal in the physics of teleportation would speak of it as a "transition particle." But think of it as a kind of super-neutrino. Clearly it must have a rest mass of zero, like a neutrino. Like a neutrino, it must be fearfully difficult to find or stop. Despite several decades in which teleportation has been in common use, nobody has ever directly demonstrated the existence of a "transition particle." It must be taken on faith.
Its internal structure would be fearfully complex in terms of energy states. Its relativistic mass would be twelve thousand two hundred tons.
One more property can be postulated. Its location in space is uncertain: a probability density, thousands of miles across as it passes Proxima Centauri, and spreading. The mass of the tiny red dwarf does not bend its path significantly. As it approaches the solar system the particle may be found anywhere within a vaguely bounded wave front several hundred thousand miles across. This vagueness of position is part of what makes teleportation work. One's aim need not be so accurate.
Near Pluto the particle changes state.
Its relativistic mass converts to rest mass within the receiver cage of a drop ship. Its structure is still fearfully complex for an elementary particle: a twelve-thousand-two-hundred-ton spacecraft, loaded with instruments, its hull windowless and very smoothly contoured. Its presence here is the only evidence that a transition particle ever existed. Within the control cabin, the pilot's finger is still on the TRANSMIT button.

Karin Sagan was short and stocky. Her hands were large; her feet were small and prone to foot trouble. Her face was square and cheerful, her eyes were bright and direct, and her voice was deep for a woman's. She bad been thirty-six years old when Phoenix left the transmitter at Pluto. She was three months older now, though nine years had passed on Earth.
She had seen a trace of the elapsed years as Phoenix left the Pluto drop ship. The shuttlecraft that had come to meet them was of a new design, and its attitude tets showed the color of fusion flame. She had wondered how they made fusion motors that small.
She saw more changes now, among the gathered newstapers. Some of the women wore microskirts whose hems were cut at angles. A few of the men wore assymetrical shirts-the left sleeve long, the right sleeve missing entirely. She asked to see one man's left cuff, her attention caught by the glowing red design. Sure enough, it was a functional wristwatch; but the material was soft as cloth.
"It's a Bulova Dali," the man said. He was letting his amusement show. "New to you? Things change in nine years, Doctor."
"I thought they would," she, said lightly. "That's part of the fun."
But she remembered the shock of relief when the heat struck. She had pushed the TRANSMIT button a light-month out from Alpha Centaurus B. An instant later sweat was running from every pore of her body.
There had been no guarantee. The probability density that physicists called a transition particle could have gone past the drop ship and out into the universe at large, beyond rescue forever. Or ... a lot could happen in nine years. The station might have been wrecked or abandoned.
But the heat meant that they had made it. Phoenix had lost potential energy entering Sol's gravitational field and had gained it back in heat. The cabin felt like a furnace, but it was their body temperature that had jumped from 98.6░ to 102░, all in an instant.
"How was the trip?" The young man asked.
Karin Sagan returned to the present. "Good, but it's good to be back. Are we recording?"
"No. When the press conference starts you'll know it. That's the law. Shall we get it going?"
"Fine." She smiled around the room. It was good to see strange faces again. Three months with three other people in a closed environment...it was enough.
The young man led her to a dais. Cameras swiveled to face her, and the conference started.
Q: How was the trip?
"Good. Successful, I should say. We learned everything we wanted to know about the Centaurus systems. In addition, we learned that our systems work. The drop-ship method is feasible. We reached the nearest stars, and we came back, with no ill effects."
Q: What about the Centaurus planets? Are they habitable?
"No." It hurt to say that. She saw the disappointment around her.
Q: Neither of them checked out?
"That's right. There are six known planets circling Alpha Centaurus B. We may have missed a couple that were too small or too far out. We had to do all our looking from a light-month away. We had good hopes for B-2 and B-3-- remember, we knew they were there before we set out-but B-2 turns out to be a Venus-type with too much atmosphere, and B-3's got a reducing atmosphere, something like Earth's atmosphere three billion years ago."
Q: The colonists aren't going to like that, are they?
"I don't expect they will. We messaged the drop ship Lazarus II to turn off its JumpShift unit for a year. That means that the colony ships won't convert to rest mass when they reach the receiver. They'll be reflected back to the solar system. They should appear in the Pluto, drop ship about a month from now."
Q: Having lost nine years.
"That's right. Just like me and the rest of the crew of Phoenix. The colonists left the Pluto transmitter two months after we did."
Q: What are the chances of terraforming B-3 someday?
Karin was glad to drop the subject of the colony ships. Somehow she felt that she had failed those first potential colonists of another star system. She said, 'Pretty good, someday. I'm just talking off the top of my head, you understand. I imagine it would take thousands of years, and would involve seeding the atmosphere with tailored bacteria and waiting for them to turn methane and ammonia and hydrocarbons into air. At the moment it'll pay us better to go on looking for worlds around other stars. It's so bloody easy, with these interstellar drop ships."
Them was nodding among the newstapers. They knew about drop ships, and they had been briefed. In principle there was no difference between Lazarus II and the drop ships circling every planet and most of the interesting moons and asteroids in the solar system. A drop ship need not be moving at the same velocity as its cargo. The Phoenix, at rest with respect to Sol and the Centaurus suns, had emerged from Lazarus II's receiver cage at a third of lightspeed.
"The point is that you can use a drop ship more than once," Karin went on. "By now Lazarus II is one and a third light-years past Centaurus. We burned most of its fuel to get the ship up to speed, but there's still a maneuver reserve. Its next target is an orange-yellow dwarf, Epsilon Indi. Lazarus II will be there in about twenty eight years. Then maybe we'll send another colony group."
Q: Doctor Sagan, you were as far from Sol as anyone in history has ever gotten. What was it like out there?
Karen giggled. 'We were as far from any star as anyone's ever gotten. It was a long night. Maybe it was getting to us. We had a bad moment when we thought there was an alien ship coming up behind us." She sobered, for that moment of relief had cost six people dearly. "It turned out to be Lazarus. I'm afraid that's more bad news. Lazarus should have been decelerating. It wasn't. We're afraid something's happened to their drive."
That caused some commotion. It developed that many of the newstapers had never heard of the first Lazarus. Karin started to explain...and that turned out to be a mistake.

The first interstellar spacecraft had been launched in 2004, thirty-one years ago.
Lazarus had been ten years in the building, but far more than ten years of labor had gone into her. Her life-support systems ran in a clear line of development back to the first capsules to orbit Earth. The first fusion-electric power plants had much in common with her main drive, and her hydrogen fuel tanks were the result of several decades of trial and error. Liquid hydrogen is tricky stuff. Centuries of medicine had produced suspended-animation treatments that allowed Lazarus to carry six crew members with life-support supplies sufficient for two.
The ship was lovely-at least, her re-entry system was lovely, a swing-wing streamlined exploration vehicle as big as any hypersonic passenger plane. Fully assembled, she looked like a haphazard collection of junk. But she was loved.
There had been displacement booths in 2004: the network of passenger teleportation had already replaced other forms of transportation over most of the world. The cargo ships that lifted Lazarus' components into orbit had been fueled in flight by JumpShift units in the tanks. It was a pity that Lazarus could not, take advantage of such a method. But conservation of momentum held. Fuel droplets entering Lazarus's tanks at a seventh of lightspeed would tear them apart.
So Lazarus had left Earth at the end of the Corliss accelerator, an improbably tall tower standing up from a flat asteroid a mile across. The fuel tanks-most of Lazarus's mass-had been launched first. Then the ship itself, with enough maneuvering reserve to run them down. Lazarus had left Earth like a string of toy balloons, and telescopes had watched as she assembled herself in deep space.
She had not been launched into the unknown. The telescopes of Ceres Base had found planets orbiting Alpha Centaurus B. Two of these might be habitable. Failing that, there might at least be seas from which hydrogen could be extracted for a return voyage.