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

"Let me examine your eyes," the doctor says, and shows Muller how to hold the hand lamp. Both of
them peer into my eyes. "I have an ointment for you to usetwice daily," he says, getting a flat jar out of his
bag. "It will burn a little."

"I will rub it on my hands then. It will warm them," I say, thinking of Eisner frozen at the front, still holding
the roll of barbed wire, perhaps.

He pulls my bottom eyelid down and rubs the ointment on with his little finger. It does not sting, but when
I have blinked it into my eye, everything has a reddish tinge. "Will you have the wireless fixed by
tomorrow?" he says.

"I don't know. Perhaps."

Muller has not put down the hand lamp. I can see by its light that he has forgotten all about the wiring
fatigue and the Russian magnet and is wondering what the doctor wants with the wireless.

The doctor puts on his mittens and picks up his bag. I realize too late I should have told him I would send
the message in exchange for them. "I will come check your eyes tomorrow," he says, and opens the door
to the snow. The sound of the front is very close.

As soon as he is gone, I tell Muller about Schwarzschild and the message the doctor wants to send. He
will not let me rest until I have told him, and we do not have time for his curiosity. We must fix the
wireless.

"If you were on the wireless, you must have sent messages for Schwarzschild," Travers said eagerly. "Did
you ever send a message to Einstein? They've got the letter Einstein sent to him after he wrote him his
theory, but if Schwarzschild sent him some kind of message, too, that would be great. It would make my
paper."

"You said that no message can escape a black hole?" I said. "But they could escape a collapsing star. Is
that not so?"

"Okay," Travers said impatiently, and made his fingers into a semicircle again. "Suppose you have a fixed
observer over here." He pulled his curved hand back and held the forefinger of his other hand up to
represent the fixed observer. "And you have somebody in the star. Say when the star starts to collapse,
the person in it shines a light at the fixed observer. If the star hasn't reached the Schwarzschild radius, the
fixed observer will be able to see the light, but it will take longer to reach him because the gravity of the
black hole is pulling on the light, so it will seem as if time on the star has slowed down, and the
wavelengths will have been lengthened, so the light will be redder. Of course that's just a thought
problem. There couldn't really be anybody in a collapsing star to send the messages."

"We sent messages," I said. "I wrote my mother asking her to knit me a pair of gloves."

There is still something wrong with the wireless. We have received only one message in two weeks. It
said, "Russian opposition collapsing," and there was so much static we could not make out the rest of it.
We have taken the wireless apart twice. The first time we found a loose wire, but the second time we
could not find anything. If Hans were here, he would be able to find the trouble immediately.

"I have a theory about the wireless," Muller says. He has had ten theories in as many days: The magnet of