"Niven, Larry - One Face" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

"You must be hoping there's air and water frozen on the dark side. But it seems like a thin chance. Why were you afraid to explain?"
"You put it that way, then ask why I didn't put it to a vote? Verd, would you have done what I did?"
"No. It's too risky."
"Suppose I tell you that I know the air and water is there. It has to be there. I can tell you what it looks like. It's a great shallow cap of ice, stratified out according to freezing points, with water ice on the bottom, then carbon dioxide, all the way up through a thick nitrogen layer to a few shifting pools of liquid helium. Surely you don't expect a one-face world to have a gaseous atmosphere? It would all freeze out on the night side. It has to!"
"It's there? There's air there? Your professional word?"
"My word as an astrophysicist. There's frozen gas back there."
Verd stretched like a great cat. He couldn't help himself. He could actually feel the muscles around his eyes and cheeks rippling as they relaxed, and a great grin crawled toward his ears. "You comedian!" he laughed. "Why didn't you say so?"
"Suppose I kept talking?"
Verd turned to look at him.
"You'll have thought of some of these things yourself. Can we breathe that air? Billions of years have passed. Maybe the composition of the air changed before it froze. Maybe too much of it boiled off into space while the sun was a red giant. Maybe there's too much, generated by outgasing after the Moon was too far away to skim it off. Lourdi said the Sun is putting out about the right amount of heat, but just how close will it be to a livable temperature? Can Jimm Farmer make us topsoil? There'll be live soil on the nightside, possibly containing frozen live bacteria, but can we get there if we have to?"
"Worst of all, can we spin the Earth in the first place? I know the drive's strong enough. I don't know about the Earth. There can't be any radioactivity left in the Earth's core, so the planet should be solid rock all the way to the center. But solid rock flows under pressure. We'll get earthquakes. Kdapt only knows how bad. Well, Captain, would you have taken all those risks?"
"She blows."
The drive was on.
Traces of hydrogen, too thin to stop a meteor, glowed faintly in the destroying light. A beam like a spotlight beam reached out over the sharp horizon, pointing dead east. Anything that light touched would flame and blow away on the wings of a photon wind. The drive nosed a little deeper into its tomb of lava.
The ground trembled. Verd turned on his flying unit, and Strac rose after him. Together they hovered over the quivering Earth. Other silver specks Boated above the plain.
In space the drive would be generating over a hundred savage gravities. Here ... almost none. Almost.
Little quick ripples came running in from the eastern horizon. They ran across the crater floor in parallel lines of dancing dust, coming closer and closer together. Rocks showered down from the old ringwall.
"Maybe I wouldn't have risked it," said Verd. "I don't know."
"That's why the Brain put me in charge. Did you see the oxygen ice as, we went by the night side? Or was it too dark? To you this frozen atmosphere is pure imagination, isn't it?"
"I'll take your professional word."
"But I don't need to. I know it's there."
Lines of dust danced over the shaking ground. But the ripples were less violent, and were coming less frequently.
"The Brain was damaged," Verd said softly.
"Yes," said Strac, frowning down into the old crater. Suddenly he touched his controls and dropped. "Come on, Verd. In a few days there'll be air. We've got to be ready for wind and rain."