"Niven, Larry - Wrong Way Street, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

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Wrong Way Street
by Larry Niven
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Copyright (c)1965 by Larry Niven
First published in Galaxy, April 1965

Fictionwise Contemporary
Science Fiction
Nebula Award(R) Nominee

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Mike Capoferri turned out to be at one time in his life the loneliest man on the Moon. But it was not his first venture into aloneness. He had felt it before, almost twenty years before, when he was twelve and his eight-year-old brother died.
Young Tony had been riding a Flexy, a kind of bobsled on wheels, down the hill road above Venice Boulevard. At the bottom of the hill he had turned hard right onto Venice. The Flexy had flipped over on its back, and its blunt rubber handle had poked hard into Tony's stomach.
One of the first things the doctor did was to take Tony's blood pressure. It was low, which meant shock. It started to fall almost as soon as the blood pressure cuff was removed, but the doctor didn't know that until it was too late. Tony's spleen was ruptured.
Mike had loved his younger brother. He sat in his room most of the time, unable to get used to his loss, and not really trying. After four weeks of it his father neglected his own grief long enough to take Mike to a child psychologist.
Mike was a recent but ardent science fiction fan. "I want to change it, Doctor Stuart," he said earnestly. "I want to go back to four weeks ago and take away Tony's Flexy." He meant it, of course.
Doctor Stuart had worked hard to get Mike to say those words. If he was thinking in terms of sibling rivalries and guilt feelings, it didn't show. "You can't do that, Mike. Time is a one-way street with no parking spaces. You just have to keep going."
"Until you have an accident," Mike said bitterly.
Doctor Stuart nodded. "Or run out of gas," he added, because he himself was old enough for the analogy to apply. They talked for almost three hours, with Mike doing most of the talking. Afterward Mike gradually stopped mourning.
* * * *
When Mike Capoferri graduated from high school he had become intensely interested in space travel. His first year at Cal Tech was the year Walnikov landed on Mars. Mike was determined to follow.
In a way he traveled further than Walnikov. He never got to Mars, but he did make it to the Moon. And unlike Mars, the Moon once had intelligent visitors.
Mike was one of many. Thirty men and women had come to the alien base, determined to probe all its secrets. By this time Mike was thirty-one years old and held doctorates in physics, mathematics and philosophy. He was tall, dark, not too homely, a little too earnest. He got over that at the base, where the only defense against strangeness was a sense of humor.
Besides the base, the aliens had thoughtfully provided one spaceship. It rested on its side near the base, a fat cylinder with conical ends and asymmetrical bulges in unexpected places. Mike began going through the ship before he ever entered the base, and he kept at it through the years. This wasn't unusual. The ship was thought to be the real treasure, for its star charts showed (in hard-to-read notations in ultraviolet ink) that it had cruised between widely separated stars. It may have had a faster-than-light drive.
The base personnel lived in the base itself, with their own air regenerating system and their own airlock built into the open alien airlock. There was plenty of room for them. The aliens had averaged ten feet tall, and there were things which must have been bunks for forty-eight of them.
Still, the base took getting used to. The alien engineers had put steps and ledges in the floor wherever the ground beneath wasn't exactly level. Newcomers learned not to sit on the "bunks," which looked like pieces of free-form sculpture, felt like foam rubber with a metal core, and changed shape without warning. They were told not to touch mosaic designs which had been marked with paint, for the design might hide a control of some kind.
* * * *
It was four years since Mike had landed on the Moon. In that time the human tenants had made a great deal of progress.
An emergency repair kit from the ship had yielded a method of creating artificial crystals of almost any shape from almost any solid, by building them up atom by atom. Already ships had lifted on rocket motors built from large diamonds.
A box which held perfectly preserved sections from some non-terrestrial animals, possibly used as food, had given them a field which would interrupt any chemical process. The applications were numerous and varied. A short-range death ray. A beam to fight forest fires. A new method of inducing suspended animation, very useful in surgery.
A sculpting implement, used by the aliens as a means of recreation (the base was infested with the statues they had left behind), had become a disintegrator. Turning it on had been heartbreakingly difficult. Mike had solved that problem in his second year, but had never been able to turn it off. The alien rec room had to be kept in vacuo, with a separate airlock, because air disappeared into the little ball of nothing at the end of the sculpting tool.
Enough progress had been made on the alien number system that it was possible to do calculus with it. The money system, however, remained a complete mystery.
Aside from the crystal maker and the airlock controls, the ship was as great and as fascinating an enigma as ever. The rows of "bunks" near the back -- suppose a bunk changed shape and dumped its occupant during a 5G maneuver? The controls, in plain sight on a common-sense control board in the bunk section -- what did it take to make them work? And what was the purpose of the dull red tetrahedron, seven feet on a side, which was set in the rear wall of the passenger section?
Mike was taking a coffee break with Terry Holmes, a pretty, cheerful, blonde little Doctor of Languages, the day he first said, "I think I know what the central pyramid is for."
Many people had said that, of course, but Mike was not addicted to wild guesses. "What is it?" Terry asked eagerly.
"It's a time machine," he said.
Terry got mad and left the table. The Halloween before Mike had dressed to imitate an alien statue and had frighteningly "come to life" before her horrified eyes. Since then she had been sensitive about his jokes.
"No, really," he told her during the afternoon coffee break. "The idea makes a great deal of sense. We can be sure that the aliens had suspended animation, can't we?"
"Sure." The reaction damping field was perfect for that purpose.
"Right. So if they had time travel to go with it, it adds up to an FTL drive. They can sleep through a hundred-year journey and then move back a hundred years."
"You're only guessing," Terry told him. "If the pyramid is an interstellar drive they didn't need time travel. If they had suspended animation they could have spent generations on one trip. We'll have to do that ourselves, probably."
"Sure, but the idea of a time-travel device in the center of a spaceship is at least logical. I've been working on the thing for quite a while, and I think that's what it is. I've made it produce a weak gravitational field, so I know it can distort four-space."
"Then it's for artificial gravity." She laughed as his face fell. "Mike, I dub thee world's champion rationalizer. And now I've got to get back to work."
For a month nothing important happened. Carlos found a way to turn on the alien television set and got three-dimensional, technicolor static. Terry made some progress with the alien money; she had a tentative ordering of coins into either ascending or descending value, if in fact they were coins.