"Larry Niven - A Gift From Earth (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

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A GIFT FROM EARTH -- Larry Niven

(Version 2002.03.17)


CHAPTER 1 -- THE RAMROBOT

A RAMROBOT had been the first to see Mount Lookitthat. Ramrobots had been first visitors
to all the settled worlds. The interstellar ramscoop robots, with an unrestricted fuel supply
culled from interstellar hydrogen, could travel between stars at speeds approaching that of light.
Long ago the UN had sent ramrobots to nearby stars to search out habitable planets. It was a
peculiarity of the first ramrobots that they were not choosy. The Procyon ramrobot, for instance,
had landed on We Made It in spring. Had the landing occurred in summer or winter, when the
planet's axis points through its sun, the ramrobot would have sensed the fifteen-hundred-mile-per-
hour winds. The Sirius ramrobot had searched out the two narrow habitable bands on Jinx, but had
not been programmed to report the planet's other peculiarities. And the Tau Ceti ramrobot,
Interstellar Ramscoop Robot #4, had landed on Mount Lookitthat. Only the Plateau on Mount
Lookitthat was habitable. The rest of the planet was an eternal searing black calm, useless for
any purpose. The Plateau was smaller than any region a colony project would settle by choice. But
Inter stellar Ramscoop Robot #4 had found a habitable point, and that was all it knew.
The colony slowboats, which followed the ramrobots. had not been built to make round
trips. Their passengers had to stay, always. And so Mount Lookitthat was settled, more than three
hundred years ago.
A flock of police cars fanned out behind the fleeing man. He could hear them buzzing like
summer bumble-bees. Now, too late, they were using all their power. In the air this pushed them to
one hundred miles per hour: fast enough for transportation in as small a region as Mount
Lookitthat, but, just this once, not fast enough to win a race. The running man was only yards
from the edge.
Spurts of dust erupted ahead of the fugitive. At last the Implementation police had
decided to risk damaging the body. The man bit the dust like a puppet thrown in anger, turned over
hugging one knee. Then he was scrambling for the cliff's sharp edge on the other knee and two
hands. He jerked once more, but kept moving...At the very edge he looked up to see a circling car
coming right at him from the blue void beyond.
With the tip of his tongue held firmly between his teeth, Jesus Pietro Castro aimed his
car at the enraged, agonized, bearded face. An inch too low and he'd hit the cliff; an inch too
high and he'd miss the man, miss his chance to knock him back onto the Plateau. He pushed two fan
throttles forward...
Too late. The man was gone.
Later, they stood at the edge and looked down.
Often Jesus Pietro had watched groups of children standing fearful and excited at the void
edge, looking down toward the hidden roots of Mount Lookitthat, daring each other to go closer and
closer. As a child he had done the same. The wonder of that view had never left him.
Forty miles below, beneath a swirling sea of white mist, was the true surface of Mount
Lookitthat the planet. The great plateau on Mount Lookitthat the mountain had a surface less than
half the size of California. All the rest of the world's surface was a black oven, hot enough to
melt lead, at the bottom of an atmosphere sixty times as thick as Earth's.
Matthew Keller had committed, deliberately, one of the worst of possible crimes. He had
crawled off the edge of the Plateau, taking with him his eyes, his liver and kidneys, his miles of