"Niven, Larry - The Missing Mass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

“The Missing Mass”
by Larry Niven
Midmorning Saturday, the fourth day after the landings, the Draco Tavern was frantic.
You never can tell how the biorhythms of a score of alien species will interact after the landers come down. None of them cycle through exactly twenty-four hours unless they medicate themselves. The first two days I’d been swamped in the mornings. The evenings had been half dead.
Gail, Jehaneh, and Herman were all on duty. Nearing noon, they seemed to have it under control. I could almost relax.
The Draco Tavern is all one room. During the remodeling the bar became a ring in the middle set higher than the main floor, to give me a chance to look around. This many disparate life forms don’t always get along. I’ve learned diplomacy. I’ve got stun gear too.
Four Low Jumbos huddled close around a table, almost hiding it. Low Jumbos like crowds. They only show up when there’s no room for them. Their bodies shook; the roar of their laughter leaked through the privacy shields as a synchronized bass huf huf huf. Their combined bulk nearly hid an entity their own size, the Terminator Beaver working with his computer against the west wall.
Ten Bebebebeque, sixteen-inch-tall golden bugs, perched around the rim of a table conversing with a Chirpsithra and a gray-and-pink jellyfish in a big glass tank of foamy water…big enough to crush my table, it looked like, so it must be sitting on a magnetic float. The jellyfish was new to me. Harsh blue light shone down from the top of the tank, illuminating an intricate internal structure and five dark, wiry tentacles knotted at the center. Evolution beneath a hot, fast-burning sun would explain why they hadn’t adapted to the land…if there was land where they evolved. Water worlds seem to be common.
Jehaneh set a tray on their table. The water creature used skeletal waldo arms to move a pink canape through its little airlock. I watched the canape slide into its translucent interior.
Jehaneh came back to the bar, looking pleasantly bemused. “Carpaccio flavored with sea salt,” she said. “Do all the seagoing forms want red meat?”
“Mammal meat is higher energy than they’re used to. They all have to try it, but it makes them hyper. Sometimes they get sick.”
“I need four more sparkers,” she said, “and four Bull Shots.”
There were Chirpsithra at most of the tables. They’re the ones who use the sparkers, and they make and run the interstellar ships. They look like attenuated crustaceans, three meters tall and higher, and red like a boiled lobster.
Four humans in Arab robes settled around a table. Iraqi seem to have rediscovered the pursuit of wisdom. Aliens made overtures, and they broke into pairs. Two joined the Low Jumbos. Two took high chairs to talk to a Chirpsithra.
A man stopped in shock in the double door airlock.
He didn’t look like the usual run of xenobiologist or diplomat. Short, pale of skin, oriental eyes, straight black hair going gray, a comfortable old suit and weird tie, a laptop computer hanging from one hand. He wore the vague look of a scholar with a wandering mind. It took him a moment to recover his aplomb.
Then he made his circuitous way toward the bar, shying wide of aliens, way wide of the Folk, who laughed at him with lolling tongues, like a pack of wolves with their heads on upside down.
I was human. He was really, really glad to see me. He set the computer on the bar and asked, “Can you make me an Irish coffee?” English accent overlaid on something oriental. Having second thoughts, “Leave out the whiskey.”
I told him, “I can do coffee any way you want it, or expresso, cappuccino—”
“Cappuccino would be perfect.”
He didn’t try to talk over the shriek of live steam. He opened his laptop and booted it up. In the sudden quiet that followed he said, “I’m Roger Teng-Hui. I’m looking for someone.”
I asked, “Human or alien?”
“E-mail correspondent,” he said. “I’m looking for Helmuthdip.” He turned the Toshiba around. He had World Online up and running.
I read an email message from :

If the Chirpsithra have such a power source, they may be willing to share it. A Human diplomat might ask.
I asked him, “Power source?”
“He thinks the Chirpsithra are using the energy of the vacuum.”
I let that crypticism go past me. “When did you first contact this ‘Helmuthdip’?”
“Wednesday evening.”
“What’s he want?”
“He seems to want me to put political pressure on the crew from that starship! At first he didn’t mention politics, interstellar or otherwise. I took him for human.”
The chirp liner Scrilbree Zesh had been in place near the Moon last Tuesday morning. The landers were down before Wednesday noon. Give ‘Helmuthdip’ a couple of hours to buy a computer in Forelgrad and play with it a little…. I said, “The timing’s tight. You don’t know the species?”
“I thought he was human! He had a website up, a discussion group on the problem of the missing mass. My filter program caught it. The site didn’t look active. It was just him.”
I waited.
“I didn’t think I was dealing with a political pressure group. He knew things. He was interested. You know, a dedicated astrophysics site would have been easy before the Chirpsithra came. I’ve been teaching on PBS and the Net for twenty years. Most of my students have disappeared, and I’m the only teacher left.”
Herman asked for Arabian coffee for the Iraqi. He took the tiny cups and went off, and I said, “I suppose the problem is that the Chirpsithra know it all.”
Teng grimaced. “Do they really?”
“They say so. Their passengers say so. Sometimes they play jokes. I might buy that they know everything they want to,” I said, “and what they don’t know, their passengers know, and when they don’t, they bluff. I’m used to it. I never thought about it from a teacher’s viewpoint, but…it must be like everybody’s sitting around waiting for the answers!”
“Flipping to the back of the book. Give me another cappuccino. Grand Marnier on the side. Do they ever make mistakes, or are all of these entities too advanced?”
“Oh, they make mistakes.” A qarashteel had come to Earth to make cheap war movies…but I shouldn’t blurt that out to just anyone. “Your alien would still have had to learn how to use the Internet. Maybe a human being showed him. Let me try something,” I said. I linked into the Britannica’s universal encyclopedia site, found what I wanted and turned the screen around.
“ ‘Helmuth speaks for Boskone.’ Early science fiction. Helmuth was a space pirate, and a ‘dip’ is a pickpocket. You’re looking for a spacegoing petty thief. Excuse me.” Things had gotten busy around the big table, and I went off to deal with it.
#
The Draco Tavern has always been as much a fast food joint as a bar, but our supplies and capabilities have expanded over the years. We charge too much because we have to keep too much stuff around, and we have to be too careful what happens to it. Most of this stuff would poison most of the life forms we get in here, and that does include the booze.
A Chirpsithra knew me, though I didn’t recognize her. You can’t tell Chirps apart; they’re gene-engineered to identical perfection. I gestured at the Low Jumbos and asked her, “Do they like crowds that much? Or should I be getting bigger tables?”
“You would not see the end of that endeavor! These—” Something breathy—“are not the largest of our clients!”
Other Chirps chittered laughter. One said, “There are life forms that would not fit in any imaginable vehicle!”
The other, “But were they sapient? How could we ever know?”
Chirpsithra obscurities. I moved on. We were frantic for the next hour.
Then the Iraqi all rose and went out—prayer time, I guess—and suddenly most of the bar was getting up and walking, rolling, lurching, slithering through the airlock into a horizontal glare of Siberian tundra. The Low Jumbos followed the rest.

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