"Larry Niven - Crashlander (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

"But that's impossible. Isn't it?"

"You see the point. Come with me." The puppeteer trotted toward the bow.

I saw the point, all right. Nothing, but nothing, can get through a General Products hull. No
kind of electromagnetic energy except visible light. No kind of matter, from the smallest
subatomic particle to the fastest meteor. That's what the company's advertisements claim, and the
guarantee backs them up. I've never doubted it, and I've never heard of a General Products hull
being damaged by a weapon or by anything else.

On the other hand, a General Products hull is as ugly as it is functional. The puppeteer-owned
company could be badly hurt if it got around that something could get through a company hull. But
I didn't see where I came in.

We rode an escalladder into the nose.

The lifesystem was in two compartments. Here the Laskins had used heat-reflective paint. In the
conical control cabin the hull had been divided into windows. The relaxation room behind it was a
windowless reflective silver. From the back wall of the relaxation room an access tube ran aft,
opening on various instruments and the hyperdrive motors.

There were two acceleration couches in the control cabin. Both had been torn loose from their
mountings and wadded into the nose like so much tissue paper, crushing the instrument panel. The
backs of the crumpled couches were splashed with rust brown. Flecks of the same color were all
over everything: the walls, the windows, the viewscreens. It was as if something had hit the
couches from behind: something like a dozen paint-filled toy balloons striking with tremendous
force.

"That's blood," I said.

"That is correct. Human circulatory fluid."



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***

Twenty-four hours to fall.

I spent most of the first twelve hours in the relaxation room, trying to read. Nothing
significant was happening, except that a few times I saw the phenomenon Sonya Laskin had mentioned
in her last report. When a star went directly behind the invisible BVS-1, a halo formed. BVS-1 was
heavy enough to bend light around it, displacing most stars to the sides, but when a star went
directly behind the neutron star, its light was displaced to all sides at once. Result: a tiny
circle which flashed once and was gone almost before the eye could catch it.

I'd known next to nothing about neutron stars the day the puppeteer picked me up. Now I was an