"Niven, Larry - Rainbow Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

RAINBOW MARS
by Larry Niven
Copyright (c) 1999 by Larry Niven

This is for Marilyn, who won't read fantasy unless I write it.

CONTENTS
Rainbow Mars
The Flight of the Horse
Leviathan!
Bird in the Hand
There's a Wolf in My Time Machine
Death in a Cage
Afterword: Svetz and the Beanstalk

Another major advance in our understanding of Mars has come from analysis of the MOLA topographic data. Although relative topographic variations have been known since 1972 from Mariner 9 data, the detailed topography needed to understand many of the features on Mars is only now being provided by MGS. Even with the present elliptical orbit, MOLA is providing vertical resolutions of about 30 cm with horizontal resolutions of 300 to 400 m. MOLA has been able to provide detailed topographic information about individual features such as impact craters, volcanoes, fractures, channels, and polar deposits. One discovery is that some of the channels, including Ares Valles in whose outwash area Mars Pathfinder landed, are deeper than previously thought, indicating more water has flowed through the channels than earlier suspected. In addition, MOLA has revealed that the northern plains of Mars are extremely flat, as smooth as the Earth's oceanic abyssal plains. The smoothness of the northern plains supports the theory that they are sediments deposited in a vast ocean which once covered this area.
"Revealing the Secrets of Mars" by Nadine G. Barlow Ad Astro-the magazine of the National Space Society
July/August 1998


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RAINBOW MARS

+390 Atomic Era. Svetz was nearly home, but the snake was waking up.

Gravity pulled outward from the center of the extension cage as it was pulled toward present time. The view through the wall was a jitter of color and motion. Svetz lay on his back and looked up at the snake. A filter helmet showed only as a faint golden glow around its head. It wouldn't strangle on post-Industrial air, and it couldn't bite him through the inflated bubble.

A ripple ran down the feathers along its spine, a gaudy flurry of color, nine meters from head to tip of tail. It seemed to take forever. Tiny rainbow-colored wings fluttered at its neck. Its eyes opened.

The natives of - 550 Atomic Era would have carved his heart out without losing that same look of dispassionate arrogance.

Svetz raised the noodle rifle.

A loop of it shimmied aside as he fired. The anesthetic crystal needle shattered on the wall. The shimmy ran down the tail, while Svetz fired again and missed again. Then the tailtip snapped down and flicked the needle gun out of his hands.

Svetz cringed back.

The rainbow-feathered head lifted to study him.

+1108 Atomic Era. Watery colors around the cage took on shapes. For an instant Svetz saw startled techs, and Ra Chen yell-tig. Then the snake fell over him in coils, knocking the breath out f him. Coils constricted around his torso. He wriggled an arm free and reached for the needle gun, but a loop of tail coiled around his wrist.

Immobile, he looked into the ophidian face.

The hatch opened. Techs played sonic handguns along the snake's length. It went limp. Hillary Weng-Fa and Wilt Miller pulled Svetz out of the X-cage and looked him over. Other techs coiled be torpid snake on a lifter platform for transport to the Secretary-General's Vivarium.

Wrona pushed past Chairman Ra Chen to lick Svetz's face, Svetz hugged her. The touch of fur was a comfort.

"Feathers," Ra Chen said. "Futz. Are you all right?"

"Fine. Sir, I think it decided not to kill me. Treat it right."