"Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - Spirals" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

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SPIRALS


by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle


There are always people who want to revise history. No hero is so great that someone won’t
take a shot at him. Not even Jack Halfey.
Yes, I knew Jack Halfey. You may not remember my name. But in the main airlock of
industrial Station One there’s an inscribed block of industrial diamond, and my name is sixth
down: Cornelius L. Riggs, Metallurgist. And you might have seen my face at the funeral.
You mast remember the funeral. All across the solar system work stopped while Jack Halfey
took his final trek into the sun. He wanted it that way, and no spacer was going to refuse Jack
Halfey’s last request, no matter how expensive it might be. Even the downers got in the act. They
didn’t help pay the cost, but they spent hundreds of millions on sending reporters and cameras to
the Moon..
That funeral damned near killed me. The kids who took me to the Moon weren’t supposed to
let the ship take more than half a gravity. My bones are over a hundred years old, and they’re
fragile. For that young squirt of a pilot the landing may have been smooth, but she hit a full gee
for a second there, and I thought my time had come.
I had to go, of course. The records say I was Jack’s best friend, the man who’d saved his
life, and being one of the last survivors of the Great Trek makes me somebody special. Noth ing
would do but that I push the button to send Jack on his “final spiral into the sun.” to quote a
downer reporter.
I still see TriVee programs about ships “spiraling” into the sun. You’d think seventy
yeals and more after the Great Trek the schools would teach kids something about space.
When I staggered outside in lunar gravity—lighter than the 20% gravity we keep in the
Skylark. just enough to feel the difference—the reporters were all over me. Why, they demanded,
did Jack want to go into the sun? Cremation and scattering of ashes is good enough for most
spacers. It was good enough for Jack’s wife. Some send their ashes back to Earth; some are
scattered into the solar wind, to be flung throughout the universe; some prefer to go back into
the soil of a colony sphere. But why the sun?
I’ve wondered myself. I never was good at reading Jack’s mind. The question that nearly
drove me crazy, and did drive me to murder, was: why did Jack Halfey make the Great Trek in the
first place?
I finally did learn the answer to that one. Be patient.

Probably there will never be another funeral like Jack’s. The Big Push is only a third
finished, and it’s still two hundred miles of the biggest linear accelerator ever built, an
electronicpowered railway crawling across the Earthside face of the Moon. One day we’ll use it to
launch starships. We’ll fire when the Moon is full, to add the Earth’s and Moon’s orbital
velocities to the speed of the starship, and to give the downers a thrill. But we launched Jack
when the Moon was new, with precisely enough velocity to cancel the Earth’s orbital speed of
eighteen miles per second, It would have cost less to send him into interstellar space.
Jack didn’t drop in any spiral. The Earth went on and the coffin stayed behind, then it