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

black hole because gravity has become so strong, and so the collapse appears frozen at the
Schwarzschild radius."

"Frozen," I said, thinking of Mullen

"Yeah. As a matter of fact, the Russians call black holes 'frozen stars.' You were at the Russian front,
weren't you?"

"What?"

"In World War I."

"But the star doesn't really freeze," I said. "It goes on collapsing."

"Yeah, sure," Travers said. "It keeps collapsing in on itself until even the atoms are stripped of their
electrons and there's nothing left except what they call a naked singularity, but we can't see past the
Schwarzschild radius, and nobody inside a black hole can tell us what it's like in there because they can't
get messages out, so nobody can ever know what it's like inside a black hole."

"I know," I said, but he didn't hear me.

He leaned forward. "What was it like at the front?"

It is so cold we can only work on the wireless a few minutes at a time before our hands stiffen and grow
clumsy, and we are afraid of dropping the liquid barretter. Muller holds his gloves over the Primus stove
and then puts them on. I jam my hands into my ice-stiff pockets.

We are fixing the wireless set. Eisner, who had been delivering messages between the sectors, got sent
up to the front when he could not fix his motorcycle. If we cannot fix the wireless, we will cease to be
telegraphists and become soldiers, and we will be sent to the front lines.

We are already nearly there. If it were not snowing, we could see the barbed wire and pitted snow of No
Man's Land, and the big Russian coal boxes sometimes land in the communication trenches. A shell hit
our wireless hut two weeks ago. We are ahead of our own artillery lines, and some of the shells from our
guns fall on us, too,because the muzzles are worn out. But it is not the front, and we guard the liquid
barretter with our lives.

"Eisner's unit was sent up on wiring fatigue last night," Muller says, "and they have not come back. I have
a theory about what happened to them."

"Has the mail come?" I say, rubbing my sore eyes and then putting my cold hands immediately back in
my pockets. I must get some new gloves, but the quartermaster has none to issue. T have written my
mother three times to knit me a pair, but she has not sent them yet.

"I have a theory about Eisner's unit," he says doggedly. "The Russians have a magnet that has pulled them
into the front."

"Magnets pull iron, not people," I say.

I have a theory about Muller's theories. Littering the communications trenches are things that the soldiers