"Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner - Fleet of Worlds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

2198 Long Pass is boarded.
2645 A supernovae chain reaction is discovered at the
galaxy's core.

The Fleet of Worlds begins its flight to safety.
2650 First expedition of Explorer to the Gw'oth world.

In Known Space, UN authorities renew their search
for the recently vanished Puppeteers.

Political crises brew on Earth and Hearth.

Colonists seek the truth about their past.

And so: Many events, on several worlds, ensue.
2652 New Terra charts its own course.




PROLOGUE Earth date: 2197


Long Pass crossed the sky in a series of shallow curves, because Diego MacMillan willed it so.

Interstellar space is not uniform. The tenuous interstellar medium isn't just a few atoms of hydrogen per
cubic inch, forever. There are pockets of greater density, some thick enough to form strings of stars,
given time. Between the dense patches there is nothing. A Bussard ramjet like Long Pass, which eats
interstellar hydrogen and accelerates by spitting out fused helium, must coast between the denser clouds.

This is worse than it sounds. At any reasonable fraction of light speed, interstellar muck comes on like
cosmic rays. As much as propulsion, a Bussard ramjet's purpose is to guide that lethal muck away from
the life support system.

Every simulation run in Sol system had reached the same inconclusive conclusion: Course tweaking to
exploit density fluctuations in the interstellar medium was "likely to be" unproductive. Between Sol and
the target star the muck was thick enough. Sure, a course tweak might funnel a bit more hydrogen into
the ramscoop here, but was it enough to compensate later? A slight diversion at these velocities took a
heavy toll in kinetic energy. And what would you find when you reached the end of a detour? Maybe that
was where the law of averages caught up with you, and the near-vacuum of interstellar gas became
vacuum indeed.

Of course, flatlanders had built the models. Diego MacMillan had nodded noncommittally at their advice.
Technically he was also a flatlander—spacers pinned that label on every Earthborn—but he had traveled
across the solar system. Once Long Pass launched, whether he undertook the experiment was beyond
their control.
Long Pass had followed its wobbly curves for decades now. Maybe he'd saved a few months' travel.
That was okay. Studying the variations, plotting alternate courses, assessing probabilities—they kept him
busy. What had the experts imagined the ship's navigator would do for decades?