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

The stars were fiercely blue, warped to streaked lines near that special point. I thought I
could see it now, very small and dim and red, but it might have been imagination. In twenty
minutes I'd be rounding the neutron star. The drive grumbled behind me. In effective free-fall, I
unfastened the safety net and pushed myself out of the chair.

A gentle push aft -- and ghostly hands grasped my legs. Ten pounds of weight hung by my fingers
from the back of the chair. The pressure should drop fast. I'd programmed the autopilot to reduce
the thrust from two gees to zero during the next two minutes. All I had to do was be at the center
of mass, in the access tube, when the thrust went to zero.

Something gripped the ship through a General Products hull. A psychokinetic life-form stranded
on a sun twelve miles in diameter? But how could anything alive stand such gravity?

Something might be stranded in orbit. There is life in space: outsiders and sailseeds and maybe
others we haven't found yet. For all I knew or cared, BVS-1 itself might be alive. It didn't
matter. I knew what the X-force was trying to do. It was trying to pull the ship apart.

There was no pull on my fingers. I pushed aft and landed on the back wall, on bent legs. I knelt
over the door, looking aft/down. When free-fall came, I pulled myself through and was in the
relaxation room looking down/forward into the nose.

Gravity was changing faster than I liked. The X-force was growing as zero hour approached, while
the compensating rocket thrust dropped. The X-force tended to pull the ship apart; it was two gees
forward at the nose, two gees backward at the tail, and diminished to zero at the center of mass.
Or so I hoped. The pack and lighter had behaved as if the force pulling them had increased for
every inch they had moved sternward.

The back wall was fifteen feet away; I had to jump it with gravity changing in midair. I hit on
my hands, bounced away. I'd jumped too late. The region of free-fall was moving through the ship
like a wave as the thrust dropped. It had left me behind. Now the back wall was up to me, and so
was the access tube.

Under something less than half a gee, I jumped for the access tube. For one long moment I stared
into the three-foot tunnel, stopped in midair and already beginning to fall back, as I realized
that there was nothing to hang on to. Then I stuck my hands in the tube and spread them against
the sides. It was all I needed. I levered myself up and started to crawl.

The dictaphone was fifty feet below, utterly unreachable. If I had anything more to say to
General Products, I'd have to say it in person. Maybe I'd get the chance. Because I knew what
force was trying to tear the ship apart.

It was the tide.

***

The motor was off, and I was at the ship's midpoint. My spread-eagled position was getting
uncomfortable. It was four minutes to perihelion.

Something creaked in the cabin below me. I couldn't see what it was, but I could clearly see a
red point glaring among blue radial lines, like a lantern at the bottom of a well. To the sides,