"Niven, Larry - The Coldest Place" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

"I'd better check your maintenance."

4 THE COLDEST PLACE


"Okay, good. Go oil my prosthetic aids."
"Prosthetic aids"-that was a hot one. I'd thought it up myself. I pushed the coffee button so it would be ready when I was through, then opened the big door in the forward wall of the cabin. Eric looked much like an electrical network, except for the gray mass at the top which was his brain. In all directions from his spinal cord and brain, connected at the walls of the intricately shaped glass-and soft-plastic vessel which housed him, Eric's nerves reached out to master the ship. The instruments which mastered Eric-but he was sensitive about having it put that way-were banked along both sides of the closet. The blood pump pumped rhythmically, seventy beats a minute.
"How do I look?" Eric asked.
"Beautiful. Are you looking for flattery?"
"Jackass! Am I still alive?"
"The instruments think so. But I'd better lower your fluid temperature a fraction." I did. Ever since we'd landed I'd had a tendency to keep temperatures too high. "Everything else looks okay. Except your food tank is getting low."
"Well, it'll last the trip."
"Yeah. 'Sense me. Eric, coffee's ready." I went and got it. The only thing I really worry about is his "liver." It's too complicated. It could break down too easily. If it stopped making blood sugar Eric would be dead.
If Eric dies I die, because Eric is the ship. If I die Eric dies, insane, because he can't sleep unless I set his prosthetic aids.
I was finishing my coffee when Eric yelled. "Hey!"
"What's wrong?" I was ready to run in any direction.
"It's only helium!"
He was astonished and indignant. I relaxed.
"I get it now, Howie. Helium II. That's all our monsters are. Nuts."
Helium II, the superfluid that flows uphill. "Nuts doubled. Hold everything, Eric. Don't throw away your samples. Check them for contaminants."
"For what?"
"Contaminants. My body is hydrogen oxide with contaminants. If

LARRY NIVEN 5

the contaminants in the helium are complex enough it might be alive."
"There are plenty of other substances," said Eric, "but I can't analyze them well enough. We'll have to rush this stuff back to Earth while our freezers can keep it cool."
I got up. "Take off right now?"
"Yes, I guess so. We could use another sample, but we're just as likely to wait here while this one deteriorates."
"Okay, I'm strapping down now. Eric?"
"Yeah? Takeoff in fifteen minutes, we have to wait for the iondrive section. You can get up."
"No, I'll wait. Eric, I hope it isn't alive. I'd rather it was just helium II acting like it's supposed to act."
"Why? Don't you want to be famous, like me?"
"Oh, sure, but I hate to think of life out there. It's just too alien. Too cold. Even on Pluto you could not make life out of helium II."
"It could be migrant, moving to stay on the night side of the predawn crescent. Pluto's day is long enough for that. You're right, though; it doesn't get colder than this even between the stars. Luckily I don't have much imagination."
Twenty minutes later we took off. Beneath us all was darkness and only Eric, hooked into the radar, could see the ice dome contracting until all of it was visible: the vast layered ice cap that covers the coldest spot in the solar system, where midnight crosses the equator on the black back of Mercury.



This, my first story, became obsolete before it was printed. Mercury does have an atmosphere, and rotates once for every two of its years.
The sequel which follows fared somewhat better. LN