"H. Beam Piper - Four-Day Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

Hartzenbosch always took the attitude that he was conferring a favor on
the Times when he had anything he wanted publicity on.

The elevator door opened, and Lautier and the professor joined in the
push to get into it. I hung back, deciding to wait for the next one so that I
could get in first and get back to the rear, where my hamper wouldn't be
in people's way. After a while, it came back empty and I got on, and when
the crowd pushed off on the top level, I put my hamper back on
contragravity and towed it out into the outdoor air, which by this time
had gotten almost as cool as a bake-oven.

looked up at the sky, where everybody else was looking. The
Peenemünde wasn't visible; it was still a few thousand miles off-planet.
Big ragged clouds were still blowing in from the west, very high, and the
sunset was even brighter and redder than when I had seen it last, ten
hours before. It was now about 1630.

Now, before anybody starts asking just who's crazy, let me point out
that this is not on Terra, nor on Baldur nor Thor nor Odin nor Freya, nor
any other rational planet. This is Fenris, and on Fenris the sunsets, like
many other things, are somewhat peculiar.
 Fenris is the second planet of a G» star, six hundred and fifty
light-years to the Galactic southwest of the Sol System. Everything else
equal, it should have been pretty much Terra type; closer to a cooler
primary and getting about the same amount of radiation. At least, that's
what the book says. I was born on Fenris, and have never been off it in the
seventeen years since.

Everything else, however, is not equal. The Fenris year is a trifle shorter
than the Terran year we use for Atomic Era dating, eight thousand and a
few odd Galactic Standard hours. In that time, Fenris makes almost
exactly four axial rotations. This means that on one side the sun is
continuously in the sky for a thousand hours, pouring down unceasing
heat, while the other side is in shadow. You sleep eight hours, and when
you get up and go outside—in an insulated vehicle, or an^
extreme-environment suit—you find that the* shadows have moved only
an inch or so, and it's that much hotter. Finally, the sun crawls down to
the horizon and hangs there for a few days-periods of twenty-four G.S.
hours—and then slides slowly out of sight. Then, for about a hundred
hours, there is a beautiful unfading sunset, and it's really pleasant
outdoors. Then it gets darker and colder until, just before sunrise, it gets
almost cold enough to freeze . C0 2
You are picking up the impression, I trust, that as planets go, Fenris is nobody's bargain. It isn't a real hell-planet, and spacemen
haven't made a swear word out of its name, as they have with the name of fluorine-atmosphere Nifflheim, but even the Reverend Hiram
Zilker, the Orthodox-Monophysite preacher, admits that it's one of those planets the Creator must have gotten a trifle absent-minded with.


The chartered company that colonized it, back at the end of the Fourth Century A.E., went bankrupt in ten years, and it wouldn't have
taken that long if communication between Terra and Fenris hadn't been a matter of six months each way. When the smash finally came, two
hundred and fifty thousand colonists were left stranded. They lost everything they'd put into the company, which, for most of them, was all