"Larry Niven - Building Harlequin's Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

Moon One.

A raw sense of power tugged at the edges of Gabriel's attention as he forced his focus to stay narrow.
He had to stay on top of this. Playing God carried awesome responsibility. His purpose was to create a
habitable world, a staging area for the antimatter generator that would refuel the carrier John Glenn.
That world, Selene, would need seas and gravity: more mass, more volatiles. Moon One must be built
up.

Selene also needed radiation shielding.

Gabriel had been bashing moons together for more than three hundred fifty years, after many more years
of research and simulation. Matters would have gone much faster in Ymir's system, he thought, a trace of
bitterness still edging his thoughts. John Glenn's equipment wasn't designed for Apollo system. He was
supposed to have two more carrier ships and all their resources to help him. Hell, he was supposed to be
someplace else entirely. Apollo's inner rocky worlds were all missing, eaten as the gas giant Daedalus
moved inward; anything he needed that wasn't among Harlequin's moons would have to be acquired
from the Kuiper Belt. Comets were as far apart as they had been in Sol system, generally as far apart as
the Sun from the Earth. Travel time expanded hugely. He was doing his damn best, but it was still taking
forever.

He stretched and twisted, working his body, pulling out as much tension as he could.

Moons Ten and Twenty-six were history, a fireball above Moon One. Impacting like that, they'd turned a
lot of their velocity into heat; but how much? The last time they tried this, with a different pair of moons,
most of the mass from the collision had just dissipated. He'd look again in a hundred years.

Time to go cold.



And WARM AGAIN, a hundred years later. He set to work.

Moon One was lightly ringed. Most of the mass of a double lunar impact was gone. He'd watch Moon
One for a while-or the Astronaut program would-and presently he'd know if its mass had grown enough.

John Glenn's frozen sleep system had been altered according to specs in their last message from Sol
system. This advanced process of being frozen didn't just retard entropy; it rejuvenated. Gabriel felt
wonderfully alive, though he sometimes pictured his life as a snake chopped up and scattered at random.

And Erika's life was scattered without regard for his or her own convenience. As a pilot, she would stay
frozen for most of the next sixty thousand years.

Meanwhile, Gabriel had work to do.

He revived his team. Moon Forty-one's surface had cooled around the three LPTs. Wayne set them to
thrusting against the moon's core.

The core wasn't as stable as Gabriel wanted-no iron ball, just a jumble of heavier stuff-and Wayne held
the thrust low. There were still tremors. Pumps fed dirty water ice from the moon into the tanks: reaction
mass for the LPTs' motors. Moon Forty-one wasn't large. This phase would be over in a few years.