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

sorry for myself. On my trips outside I kept passing Jerome's statue. For a corpse, and one which has
not been prettified by the post-surgical skills of an embalmer, he looks damn good. His frost-dusted
skin is indistinguishable from marble, and his eyes are lifted toward the stars in poignant yearning.
Each time I passed him I wondered how I would look when my turn came.
"You've got to find an oxygen layer," Sammy kept saying. Y.
"To keep you alive! Sooner or later they'll send a rescue ship. You can't give up now!"
I'd already given up. There was oxygen, but there was no such layer as Sammy kept hoping for. There
were veins of oxygen mixed with other things, like veins of gold ore in rock. Too little, too finely
distributed.
"Then use the water ice! That's only poetic justice, isn't it? You can get the oxygen out by electrolysis!"
But a rescue ship would take years. They'd have to build it from scratch, and redesign the landing
vehicle too. Electrolysis takes power, and heat takes power. I had only the batteries.
Sooner or later I'd run out of power. Sammy couldn't see this. He was more desperate than I was. I
didn't run out of last messages; I stopped sending them because they were driving Sammy crazy.
I passed Jerome's statue one time too many, and an idea came.
This is what comes of not wanting to die.
In Nevada, three billion miles from here, half a million corpses lie frozen in vaults surrounded by
liquid nitrogen. Half a million dead men wait for an earthy resurrection, on the day medical science
discovers how to unfreeze them safely, how to cure what was



killing each one of them, how to cure the additional damage done by ice crystals breaking cell walls all
through their brains and bodies.
Half a million fools? But what choice did they have? They were dying.
I was dying.
A man can stay conscious for tens of seconds in vacuum. If I moved fast, I could get out of my suit in
that time. Without that insulation to protect me, Pluto's black night would suck warmth from my body in
seconds. At 50┬░ Absolute, I'd stay in frozen storage until one version or another of the Day of
Resurrection.
Sunlight-

-And stars. No sign of the big blob that found me so singularly tasteless yesterday. But I could be looking
in the wrong direction.
I hope it got to cover.
I'm looking east, out over the splash plain. In my peripheral vision the ship looks unchanged and
undamaged.
My suit lies beside me on the ice. I stand on a peak of black rock, poised in my silvered underwear,
looking eternally out at the horizon. Before the cold touched my brain I found a last moment in which to
assume a heroic stance. Go east, young man. Wouldn't you know I'd get my directions mixed? But the
fog of my breathing-air hid everything, and I was moving in terrible haste.
Sammy Cross must be on his way home now. He'll tell them where I am.
Stars pour up from behind the mountains. The mountains and the splash plain and Jerome and I sink
endlessly beneath the sky.
My corpse must be the coldest in history. Even the hopeful dead of Earth are only stored at liquid
nitrogen temperatures. Pluto's night makes that look torrid, after the 50┬░ Absolute heat of day seeps
away into space.
A superconductor is what I am. Sunlight raises the temperature too high, switching me off like a damned
machine at every dawn. But at night my nervous system becomes a superconductor. Currents flow;
thoughts flow; sensations flow. Sluggishly. The one hundred and fifty-three hours of Pluto's rotation