"Connie Willis - Schwarzschild Radius" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

SCHWARZSCHILD RADIUS
Connie Willis
Nebula 1987 Nominee Novelette

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When a star collapses, it sort of falls in on itself." Travers curved his hand into a semicircle and then
brought the fingers in. "And sometimes it reaches a kind of point of no return where the gravity pulling in
on it is stronger than the nuclear and electric forces, and when it reaches that point, nothing can stop it
from collapsing and it becomes a black hole." He closed his hand into a fist. "And that critical diameter,
that point where there's no turning back, is called the Schwarzschild radius." Travers paused, waiting for
me to say something.

He had come to see me every day for a week, sitting stiffly on one of my chairs in an unaccustomed shirt
and tie, and talked to me about black holes and relativity, even though I taught biology at the university
before my retirement, not physics. Someone had told him I knew Schwarzschild, of course.

"The Schwarzschild radius?" I said in my quavery, old man's voice, as if I could not remember ever
hearing the phrase before, and Travers looked disgusted. He wanted me to say, "The Schwarzschild
radius! Ah, yes, I served with Karl Schwarzschild on the Russian front in World War I!" and tell him all
about how he had formulated his theory of black "holes while serving with the artillery, but I had not
decided yet what to tell him. "The event horizon," I said.

"Yeah. It was named after Schwarzschild because he was the one who worked out the theory," Travers
said. He reminded me of Muller with his talk of theories. He was the same age as Muller, with the same
shock of stiff yellow hair and the same insatiable curiosity, and perhaps that was why I let him come
every day to talk to me, though it was dangerous to let him get so close.

"I have drawn up a theory of the stars," Muller says while we warm our hands over the Primus stove so
that they will get enough feeling in them to be able to hold the liquid barretter without dropping it. "They
are not balls of fire, as the scientists say. They are frozen."

"How can we see them if they are frozen?" I say. Muller is insulted if I do not argue with him. The arguing
is part of the theory.

"Look at the wireless!" he says, pointing to it sitting disemboweled on the table. We have the back off the
wireless again, and in the barretter's glass tube is a red reflection of the stove's flame. "The light is a
reflection off the ice of the star."

"A reflection of what?"

"Of the shells, of course."

I do not say that there were stars before there was this war, because Muller will not have an answer to
this, and I have no desire to destroy his theory, and besides, I do not really believe there was a time
when this war did not exist. The star shells have always exploded over the snow-covered craters of No
Man's Land, shattering in a spray of white and red, and perhaps Muller's theory is true.
"At that point," Travers said, "at the event horizon, no more information can be transmitted out of the