"Niven, Larry - Tales of Known Space 02+03 - Protector 1.0b" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

He must not.

A protector without descendants is a being without purpose. Such an anomaly must find a purpose, and quickly, or die. Most die. In their minds or their glands a reflex twitches, and they cease to feel hunger. Sometimes such a one finds that he can adapt the entire Pak species as his progeny; but then he must find a way to serve that species. Phssthpok was one of the lucky few.

It would be terrible if he failed.

***

Nick Sohl was coming home.

The quiet of space was around him, now that his ears had learned to forget the hum of the ship's drive. Two weeks' worth of tightly coiled stubble covered his jaw and the shaved scalp on either side of his cottony Belter crest. If be concentrated he could smell himself. He had gone mining in Saturn's rings, with a singleship around him and a shovel in his hand (for the magnets used to pull monopoles from asteroidal iron did look remarkably like shovels). He would have stayed longer; but he liked to think that Belt civilization could survive without him for just about three weeks.

A century ago monopoles had been mere theory, and conflicting theory at that. Magnetic theory said that a north magnetic pole could not exist apart from a south magnetic pole, and vice-versa. Quantum theory implied that they might exist independently.

The first permanent settlements had been blooming among the biggest Belt asteroids when an exploring team found monopoles scattered through the nickel-iron core of an asteroid. Today they were not theory, but a thriving Belt industry. A magnetic field generated by monopoles acts in an inverse linear relationship rather than an inverse square. In practical terms, a monopole-based motor or instrument will reach much further. Monopoles were valuable where weight was a factor, and in the Belt weight was always a factor. But monopole mining was still a one man operation.

Nick's luck had been poor. Saturn's rings were not a good region for monopoles anyway; too much ice, too little metal. The electromagnetic field around his cargo box probably held no more than two full shovelfuls of north magnetic poles. Not much of a catch for a couple of weeks backbreaking labor... but still worth good money at Ceres.

He'd have been satisfied to find nothing. Mining was an excuse the First Speaker for the Belt Political Section used to escape from his cramped office buried deep in the rock of Ceres, from the constant UN-Belt squabbles, from wife and children, friends and acquaintances, enemies and strangers. And next year, after frantic weeks spent catching up with current events, after the next ten months spent manipulating the politics of the solar system, he would be back.

Nick was building up speed for the trip to Ceres, with Saturn a fantastic bauble behind him, when he saw his mining magnet swing slowly away from the cargo box. Somewhere to his left was a new and powerful source of monopoles.

A grin split his face like lightning across a black sky. Better late than never! Too bad he hadn't found it on the way out; but he could sell it once he'd located it... which would take doing. The needle wavered between two attractions, one of which was his cargo box.

He invested twenty minutes focusing a com laser on Ceres. "This is Nick Sohl, repeating, Nicholas Brewster Sohl. I wish to register a claim for a monopole source in the general direction of--" He tried to guess how much his cargo was affecting the needle. "--of Sagittarius. I want to offer this source for sale to the Belt government. Details follow, half an hour."

He then turned off his fusion motor, climbed laboriously into suit and backpac, and left the ship carrying a telescope and his mining magnet.

The stars are far from eternal, but for man they might as well be. Nick floated among the eternal stars, motionless though falling toward the tiny sun at tens of thousands of miles per hour. This was why he went mining. The universe blazed like diamonds on black velvet, an unforgettable backdrop for golden Saturn. The Milky Way was a jeweled bracelet for all the universe. Nick loved the Belt from the carved-out rocks to the surface domes to the spinning inside-out bubble worlds; but most of all he loved space itself.

A mile from the ship he used 'scope and mining magnet to fix the location of the new source. He moved back to the ship to call in. A few hours from now he could take another fix and pin the source by triangulation.

When he reached the ship the communicator was alight. The gaunt fair face of Martin Shaeffer, Third Speaker, was talking to an empty acceleration couch.

"--Must call in at once, Nick. Don't wait to take your second fix. This is urgent Belt business. Repeating. Martin Shaeffer calling Nick Sohl aboard singleship Hummingbird--"

Nick refocused his laser. "Lit, I'm truly honored. A simple clerk would have sufficed to record my poor find. Repeating." He set the message to repeat, then started putting away tools. Ceres was light-minutes distant.

He did not try to guess what emergency might need his personal attention. But he was worried.

Presently the answer came. Lit Shaeffer's expression was strange, but his tone was bantering. "Nick, you're too modest about your poor find. A pity we're going to have to disallow it. One hundred and four miners have already called in to report your monopole source."

Nick gaped. One hundred and four? But he was in the outer system... and most miners preferred to work their own mines anyway. How many had *not* called in?

"They're all across the system," said Lit. "It's a hell of a big source. As a matter of fact, we've already located it by paralax. One source, forty AU out from the sun, which makes it somewhat further away than Pluto, and eighteen degrees off the plane of the solar system. Mitchikov says that there must be as big a mass of south magnetic monopoles in the source as we've mined in the past century."

Outsider! thought Nick. And: Pity they'll disallow my claim.

"Mitchikov says that big a source could power a really big Bussard ramjet-- a manned ramrobot." Nick nodded at that. Ramrobots were robot probes to the nearby stars, and were one of the few sources of real UN-Belt cooperation. "We've been following the source for the past half-hour. It's moving into the solar system at just over four thousand miles per second, freely falling. That's well above even interstellar speeds. We're all convinced it's an Outsider.