"Larry Niven - Wait It Out" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

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WAIT IT OUT



Night on Pluto. Sharp and distinct, the horizon line cuts across my field of vision. Below that
broken line is the dim gray-white of snow seen by starlight. Above, space-blackness and
spacebright stars. From behind a jagged row of frozen mountains the stars pour up in singletons
and clusters and streamers of cold white dots. Slowly they move, but visibly, just fast enough for a
steady eye to capture their motion.
Something wrong there. Pluto's rotation period is long: 6.39 days. Time must have slowed for me.
It should have stopped.
I wonder if I may have made a mistake.
The planet's small size brings the horizon close. It seems even closer without a haze of atmosphere to
fog the distances. Two sharp peaks protrude into the star swarm like the filed front teeth of a cannibal
warrior. In the cleft between those peaks shines a sudden bright point.
I recognize the Sun, though it shows no more disk than any other, dimmer star. The Sun shines as a cold
point between the frozen peaks; it pulls free of the rocks and shines in my eyes . . .
The Sun is gone, the starfield has shifted. I must have passed out.
It figures.
Have I made a mistake? It won't kill me if I have. It could drive me mad, though . . .
I don't feel mad. I don't feel anything, not pain, not loss, not regret, not fear. Not even pity. Just: what a
situation.
Gray-white against gray-white: the landing craft, short and wide and conical, stands half-submerged in
an icy plain below the level of my eyes. Here I stand, looking east, waiting.
Take a lesson: this is what comes of not wanting to die.

Pluto was not the most distant planet. It had stopped being that in 1979, ten years ago. Now Pluto was at
perihelion, as close to the Sun-and to Earth-as it would ever get. To ignore such an opportunity would have
been sheer waste.
And so we came, Jerome and Sammy and 1, in an inflated plastic bubble poised on an ion jet. We'd spent a
year and a half in that bubble. After so long together, with so little privacy, perhaps we should have hated
each other. We didn't. The UN psycho team must have chosen well.
But-just to be out of sight of the others, even for a few minutes. Just to have something to do, something that
was not predictable. A new world could hold infinite surprises. As a matter of fact, so could our laboratory-
tested hardware. I don't think any of us really trusted the Nerva-K under our landing craft.
Think it through. For long trips in space, you use an ion jet giving low thrust over long periods of time. The
ion motor on our own craft had been decades in use. Where gravity is materially lower than Earth's, you land
on dependable chemical rockets. For landings on Earth and Venus, you use heat shields and the braking
power of the atmosphere. For landing on the gas giants-but who would want to?
The Nerva-class fission rockets are used only for takeoff from Earth, where thrust and efficiency count.
Responsiveness and maneuverability count for too much during a powered landing. And a heavy planet will
always have an atmosphere for braking.
Pluto didn't.
For Pluto, the chemical jets to take us down and bring us back up were too heavy to carry all that way. We
needed a highly maneuverable Nerva-type atomic rocket motor using hydrogen for reaction mass.
And we had it. But we didn't trust it.
Jerome Glass and I went down, leaving Sammy Cross in orbit. He griped about that, of course. He'd started
that back at the Cape and kept it up for a year and a half. But someone had to stay. Someone had to be aboard
the Earth-return vehicle, to fix anything that went wrong, to relay communications to Earth, and to fire the