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

whiffs of antimatter fuel when we made orbit here.
"Now, I can buy all that. We can't get to Ymir until we've made more fuel. Right. Why not just go for it?
Build a collider and make twelve hundred kilos of antimatter and go."

"First off, you'll notice that there's no inner solar system." Gabriel waved at the windows, though no such
thing was obvious to the naked eye. "No asteroids, no rocky worlds like Earth or Mars, nothing until you
get down to Daedalus, a mucking great gas giant world huddled right up against its sun. Daedalus ate
everything as it moved inward. There's only Harlequin, out here where Saturn would be if this were Sol
system, and three more gas giants and the Kuiper Belt.

"So all the distances out here are huge. Any resource we need has to come from Harlequin's moons or
the Kuiper Belt, where the little Kuiper Belt bodies are just as sparse as in Sol system. It takes forever to
get anywhere.

"We looked... the High Council looked at the problem," Gabriel said carefully, "and the Astronaut
program verifies. To build an antimatter generator, we need manpower. We'd have to warm half the ship.
The garden wouldn't feed them or recycle enough air, and we don't have the room either. They'd use up
all our resources. We'd die.

"Second possibility is to build habitats like the asteroid civilizations in Sol system. What's wrong with
that?"

Wayne snorted, though he knew he was being tested. "The Belt cities needed too much Artificial
Intelligence, too much nanotech, too much of everything we're running away from. AIs wound up running
it all."

Gabriel nodded. "So we can't do that. And we could build nanos and let them build a collider and run it
for antimatter, with Astronaut running it all. Only we deliberately forgot most of what we need to build
tailored nanotech, and Astronaut is another AI. By now it looks like Earth and Sol really have gone down
the recycler, and if it wasn't the AIs taking over, it must have been nanos turning everything to sludge. At
any rate, Sol system isn't talking.

"So what's left? We came here with gear to make Ymir habitable-a rocky world about the size of Earth,
with a reducing atmosphere. We can make a world! It's just a little bit tougher job."

Wayne said, "Sure. Where are you going to put the Beanstalk?"

Gabriel finished his last bite of stew. He asked, "Your point?"

"We stored this massive tether-making system. Ymir could have had two hundred thousand kilometers of
an orbital tether standing up from the equator, all made of carbon nanotubes. Every bit of nanotechnology
we permit ourselves is a compromise, and that was one of them. Ground to orbit transport. We'd have
an elevator to the nearby planets. Go anywhere you want in Ymir's inner system and only pay for the
electricity. What would happen if-"

"Selene would be whipping it around in Harlequin's gravity field. The tides would tear it apart. We can't
give Selene a Beanstalk. What's your point? Because I know we brought the wrong equipment for this!"

"Exactly. We don't know if it's good enough," Wayne said.