"H. Beam Piper - Four- Day Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

as cool as a bake-oven.
I looked up at the sky, where everybody else was looking. The
Peenem├╝nde wasn't visible; it was still a few thousand miles off-planet. Big
ragged clouds were still blowing in from the west, very high, and the sunset
was even brighter and redder than when I had seen it last, ten hours
before. It was now about 1630.
Now, before anybody starts asking just who's crazy, let me point out
that this is not on Terra, nor on Baldur nor Thor nor Odin nor Freya, nor any
other rational planet. This is Fenris, and on Fenris the sunsets, like many
other things, are somewhat peculiar.
Fenris is the second planet of a G4 star, six hundred and fifty light-years
to the Galactic southwest of the Sol System. Everything else equal, it
should have been pretty much Terra type; closer to a cooler primary and
getting about the same amount of radiation. At least, that's what the book
says. I was born on Fenris, and have never been off it in the seventeen
years since.
Everything else, however, is not equal. The Fenris year is a trifle shorter
than the Terran year we use for Atomic Era dating, eight thousand and a
few odd Galactic Standard hours. In that time, Fenris makes almost exactly
four axial rotations. This means that on one side the sun is continuously in
the sky for a thousand hours, pouring down unceasing heat, while the other
side is in shadow. You sleep eight hours, and when you get up and go
outsideтАФin an insulated vehicle, or an extreme-environment suitтАФyou find
that the shadows have moved only an inch or so, and it's that much hotter.
Finally, the sun crawls down to the horizon and hangs there for a few
daysтАФperiods of twenty-four G.S. hoursтАФand then slides slowly out of
sight. Then, for about a hundred hours, there is a beautiful unfading
sunset, and it's really pleasant outdoors. Then it gets darker and colder
until, just before sunrise, it gets almost cold enough to freeze CO 2. Then
the sun comes up, and we begin all over again.
You are picking up the impression, I trust, that as planets go, Fenris is
nobody's bargain. It isn't a real hell-planet, and spacemen haven't made a
swear word out of its name, as they have with the name of
fluorine-atmosphere Nifflheim, but even the Reverend Hiram Zilker, the
Orthodox-Monophysite preacher, admits that it's one of those planets the
Creator must have gotten a trifle absent-minded with.
The chartered company that colonized it, back at the end of the Fourth
Century A.E., went bankrupt in ten years, and it wouldn't have taken that
long if communication between Terra and Fenris hadn't been a matter of six
months each way. When the smash finally came, two hundred and fifty
thousand colonists were left stranded. They lost everything they'd put into
the company, which, for most of them, was all they had. Not a few lost
their lives before the Federation Space Navy could get ships here to
evacuate them.
But about a thousand, who were too poor to make a fresh start
elsewhere and too tough for Fenris to kill, refused evacuation, took over all
the equipment and installations the Fenris Company had abandoned, and
tried to make a living out of the planet. At least, they stayed alive. There
are now twenty-odd thousand of us, and while we are still very poor, we are
very tough, and we brag about it.