"Larry Niven - The Return of William Proxmire UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

УWhat happened to your time machine?Ф
УApollo Eleven landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969, just like clockwork. Apollo Thirteen left a month or two early, but something still exploded in the service module, so I guess it wasnТt a meteor. They . . . shit.Ф
УEh?Ф
УThey didnТt get back. They died. We murdered them.Ф
УThen?Ф
Could he put it back? Should he put it back? It was still coming together in his head. УLetТs see, NASA tried to cancel Apollo Eighteen, but there was a hell of a write-in campaignЧФ
УWhy? From whom?Ф
УThe spec-fic community went absolutely apeshit. Okay, Bill, IТve got it now.Ф
УWell?Ф
УYou were right, the whole science fiction magazine business just
faded out in the fifties, last remnants of the pulp era. Campbell alone couldnТt save it. Then in the sixties the literary crowd rediscovered the idea. There must have been an empty ecological niche and the litcrits moved in.
УSpeculative fiction, spec-fic, the literature of the possible. The New Yorker ran spec-fic short stories and critical reviews of novels. They thought Planet of the Apes was wonderful, and SeligТs Complaint, which was Robert SilverbergТs study of a telepath. Tom Wolfe started appearing in Esquire with his bizarre alien cultures. I canТt remember an issue of the Saturday Evening Post that didnТt have some spec-fic in it. Anderson, Vance, MacDonald . . . John D. MacDonald turns out novels set on a ring the size of EarthТs orbit.
УThe new writers were good enough that some of the early ones couldnТt keep up, but a few did it by talking to hard science teachers. Benford and Forward did it in reverse. Jim BenfordТs a plasma physicist but he writes like he swallowed a college English teacher. Robert Forward wrote a novel called Neutron Star, but he built the Forward Mass Detector, too.Ф
УWonderful.Ф
УThereТs a lot of spec-fic fans in the military. When Apollo Twenty-one burned up during reentry, they raised so much hell that Congress took the manned space program away from NASA and gave it to the Navy.Ф
William Proxmire glared and Andrew Minsky grinned. УNow, you left office in the sixties because of the cheese boycott. When you tried to chop the funding for the Shuttle, the spec-fic community took offense. They stopped eating Wisconsin cheese. The San Francisco Locus called you the Cheese Man. Most of your supporters must have eaten nothing but their own cheese for about eight months, and then Goldwater chopped the milk price supports. СGolden Fleece,Т he called it. So you were Out, and now thereТs no time machine.Ф
УWe could build one,Ф Proxmire said.
Rescue Apollo Thirteen? The possibility had to be considered. .
Andrew remembered the twenty years that followed the Apollo flights. In one set of memories, lost goals, pointlessness and depression, political faddishness leading nowhere. In the other, half a dozen space stations, government and military and civilian; Moonbase and Moonbase Polar; Life photographs of the Mars Project half-finished on the lunar plain, sitting on a hemispherical Orion-style shield made from lunar aluminum and fused lunar dust.
I do not commit murder under any circumstances.
УI donТt think so, Bill. We donТt have the political support. We donТt
have the incentive. Where would a Nobel Prize come from? We canТt prove there was ever a timeline different from this one. Besides, this isnТt just a more interesting world, itТs safer too. Admiral Heinlein doesnТt let the Soviets build spacecraft.Ф
Proxmire stopped breathing for an instant. Then, УI suppose he wouldnТt.Ф
УNope. HeТs taking six of their people on the Mars expedition, though. They paid their share of the cost in fusion bombs for propulsion.Ф