"Williamson-DarkStarOne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

"A problem, sir," Cruzet said. "This is the only planet here."

Los Doctores Cruzet and Andersen were Mondragon's amigos. They had let him prove
his conocimiento of computers and work with them on the radar search team that
searched this sunless dark until they found the planet. Cruzet's thoughts were
often away among the stars, but Andersen was muy simpatico. A red-haired Tejano
engineer who understood his Chihuahua Spanish and laughed at the dangers of
quantum flight.

"The only planet or no planet, I'm not landing on that snowball." Speaking
louder, Stecker forgot to smile. "Not since that beacon warned us off."

"Sir, we don't know it was any kind of beacon." Andersen spoke with quiet
respect. "All we saw was an odd flash of light down on the planet." He frowned
at its black dot on the holoscreen. "Odd because of the way it changed,
flickering through all the colors of the spectrum. We had no time to record
anything, and it was not repeated. The planet is so cold that it has to be
dead."

"Something's alive there." Stecker's narrow jaw set stubbornly. "Mr. Hinch takes
that flash for a response to our radar beam. A message from something that
doesn't want us landing."

"Look at it, sir." Cruzet gestured at the tiny blot. "A world without sunlight,
cold almost to absolute zero. What could live there?"

Cruzet was short and quick and dark. No Anglo, he came from the place of high
tech called CERN, and his accent was hard for Mondragon to understand. He
sometimes frowned as if Andersen's jokes were riddles to him, but he understood
the difficult mathematics of the quantum.

"You say it's dead?" Doubtfully, Stecker squinted at the black blot. "How do you
know?"

"Sir, we know dark dwarfs." Cruzet looked at Andersen and waited for his nod.
"They're born hot. Heated by gravitational contraction and nuclear fission, but
too small to burn the hydrogen that keeps bright stars bright. This one's old.
It cooled when the unstable elements were used up. That must have happened
several billion years ago. The planet's close to zero Kelvin now. No energy left
for any possible life."

"Too bad, Rima." Andersen shook his head at la rubia. "A hard world to terraform
-- "

"Forget it!" Stecker snapped. "We're not landing."

Mondragon had no liking for the captain. A man of Earth and not of space, he had
been director of Mission StarSeed. Coming aboard to inspect the ship on the day
before takeoff, he had abruptly seized command, explaining only that the mission
was finished and his work on Earth was done.