"Niven, Larry - Lucifer's Hammer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

LUCIFER'S HAMMER

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle


Prologue

Before the sun burned, before the planets formed, there were chaos and the comets.

Chaos was a local thickening in the interstellar medium. Its mass was great enough to attract itself, to hold itself, and it thickened further. Eddies formed. Particles of dust and frozen gas drifted together, and touched, and clung. Flakes formed, and then loose snowballs of frozen gases. Over the ages a whirlpool pattern developed, a fifth of a lightyear across. The center contracted further. Local eddies, whirling frantically near the center of the storm, collapsed to form planets.

It formed as a cloud of snow, far from the whirlpool's axis. Ices joined the swarm, but slowly, slowly, a few molecules at a time. Methane, ammonia, carbon dioxide; and sometimes denser objects struck it and embedded themselves, so that it held rocks, and iron. Now it was a single stable mass. Other ices formed, chemicals that could only be stable in the interstellar cold.

It was four miles across when the disaster came.

The end was sudden. In no more than fifty years, the wink of an eye in its lifetime, the whirlpool's center collapsed. A new sun burned fearfully bright.

Myriads of comets flashed to vapor in that hellish flame Planets lost their atmospheres. A great wind of light pressure stripped an the loose gas and dust from the inner system and hurled it at the stars.

It hardly noticed. It was two hundred times as far from the sun as the newly formed planet Neptune. The new sun was no more than an uncommonly bright star, gradually dimming now.

Down in the maelstrom there was frantic activity. Gases boiled out of the rocks of the inner system. Complex chemicals developed in the seas of the third planet. Endless hurricanes boded across and within the gasgiant worlds. The inner worlds would never know calm.

The only real calm was at the edge of interstellar space, in the halo, where millions of thinly spread comets, each as far from its nearest brother as Earth is from Mars, cruise forever through the cold black vacuum. Here its endless quiet sleep could last for billions of years . . . but not forever. Nothing lasts forever.

1

THE ANVIL

Against boredom, even the gods themselves struggle in vain.

Nietzsche

January: The Portent

The baytrees in our country are all wither'd
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
The palefaced moon looks bloody on the earth
And leanlook'd prophets whisper fearful change.
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.

William Shakespeare, Richard II