"Connie Willis - Schwarzschild Radius" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

I had hoped he would go away as soon as I had told him what had happened to Schwarzschild, but he
made no move to get up. "Muller was invalided out with a broken arm. He became a scientist."

"The way you did." He opened his notebook again. "Did you see Schwarzschild after that?"

The question makes no sense.

"After you got out? Before he died?"

It seems to take a long time for his words to get to me. The message bends and curves, shifting into the
red, and I can hardly make it out. "No," I say, though that is a lie.

Travers scribbles. "I really do appreciate this, Dr. Rottschieben. I've always been curious about
Schwarzschild, and now that you've told me all this stuff, I'm even more interested," Travers says, or
seems to say. Messages coming in are warped by the gravitational blizzard into something that no longer
resembles speech. "If you'd be willing to help me, I'd like to write my thesis on him."

Go. Get out. "It was a lie," I say. "I never knew Schwarzschild. I saw him once, from a distance—your
fixed observer."

Travers looks up expectantly from his notes as if he is still waiting for me to answer him.

"Schwarzschild was never even in Russia," I lie. "He spent the whole winter in hospital in Gottingen. I lied
to you. It was nothing but a thought problem."

He waits, pencil ready.

"You can't stay here!" I shout. "You have to get away. There is no safe distance from which a fixed
observer can watch without being drawn in, and once you are inside the Schwarzschild radius, you can't
get out. Don't you understand? We are still there!"

We are still there, trapped in the trenches of the Russian front, while the dying star burns itself out,
spiraling down into that center where time ceases to exist, where everything ceases to exist except the
naked singularity that is somehow Schwarzschild.

Muller tries to dig the wireless out with his crushed arm so he can send a message that nobody can
hear—
"Help us! Help us!"—and I struggle to free the hands that in spite of Schwarzschild's warmth are now so
cold I cannot feel them, and in the very center Schwarzschild burns himself out, the black hole at his
center imploding him cell by cell, carrying him down into darkness, and us with him.

"It is a trap!" I shout at Travers from the center, and the message struggles to escape and then falls back.

"I wonder how he figured it out," Travers says, and now I can hear him clearly. "I mean, can you imagine
trying to figure out something like the theory of black holes in the middle of a war and while you were
suffering from a fatal disease? And just think, when he came up with the theory, he didn't have any idea
that black holes even existed."