David Langford - The Space Eater

VIP免费

2024-12-18 0 0 489.44KB 141 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Space Eater

by David Langford

For Paul Barnett who was first maddened into suggesting I should write a book

and Peter Weston whose delusion it was that I should write this one

Chapter One originally appeared in slightly different form in THOR’S HAMMER, edited by Reginald

Bretnor, Ace Books, 1979.

Contents:

The Training Ground

Death and the Raven

The Devourer

There is therefore but one comfort left, that though it be in the power of the weakest arme to take away

life, it is not in the strongest to deprive us of death; God would not exempt himselfe from that; the misery

of immortality in the flesh he undertooke not, that was in it immortall. Certainly there is no happinesse

within this circle of flesh, nor is it in the Opticks of the eyes to behold felicity; the first day of our Jubilee is

death; the devill hath therefore fail’d of his desires; wee are happier with death than we should have been

without it; there is no miserie but in himselfe, where there is no end of miserie; and so indeed in his owne

sense, the Stoick is in the right: Hee forgets that hee can die who complains of miserie; wee are in the

power of no calamitie while death is in our owne.

Sir Thomas Browne,Religio Medici

Part One

The Training Ground

Wherefore I am a great king,

And waste the world in vain,

Because man hath not other power,

Save that in dealing death for dower,

He may forget it for an hour

To remember it again.

G.K. Chesterton,The Ballad of the White Horse

One

A mantrap bit my foot off; I dropped between two rocks because I had to, and took stock of the

damage. Five years back I’d have fainted dead away as a million volts of pain came searing up the

nerves: now it was just an irritation, a distraction. Uncomfortable, like the knobby rocks I’d landed on in

the instinctive dive for cover. I fixed the tourniquet with my left hand and teeth—younever let the gun slip

out of your right hand when in action, even if it’s only the training ground. If you’re right-handed, that is ...

I was ready to stick my head up for a quick look at the objective, but just then there was a popping and

crackling as the IR laser drew a quick line of bright sparks through the air. Superheated rockdust burst

out in clouds where the line struck; one fragment scored my forehead and filled my eyes with blood. The

years of battle training helped soak up the new pain, but I wasted more seconds tying a kerchief over the

gash with one hand only.

An electric-discharge laser would need seconds to recharge. I hoped it wasn’t a gasdynamic or chemical

job—and stuck up my head. Nothing hit me during the quick look I allowed myself then, so I tossed a

grenade and a smokebomb as far as I could toward the laser bunker and started hopping, slightly off the

direct line of approach the IR flash had drawn in the air. The guess about the laser was wrong, though,

because straight away another dotted line of ionization sparks came probing through the smoke,

shattering rock in a continuous explosion. A good shot now could smash the directing mirror and put the

damn laser out for the duration, but even a Forceman doesn’t aim too well one-legged and I didn’t care

to drop again just yet. Instead I unclipped more smokebombs from my belt and threw them way to the

right of the first cloud while I moved in from the left. Standard maneuver now was to shove a grenade

right through their firing slit.

They saw me, though, and the crackling line came tracking over toward me, and I put on

speed—Hopalong Jacklin rides again. Under the beam and skidding full-length through dust and gravel to

the base of the pillbox, the one place where the beam couldn’t aim—or that was what I was hoping. I

smelled it then. Before my eyes went cloudy gray and useless I saw the little vents in that concrete right

by my face, and realized that not only were the bastards using a chemical laser, but they were pumping

the deadly hydrogen fluoride exhaust out right here, especially for goddamn idiots like me. Then theHF

gas was stripping the skin off my face, scarring my windpipe and filling my lungs with bloody froth. There

was nothing to do but take it and wait for the end. And after a little while I died, again.

The thing about the training ground is that youcan’t win. It carries on and carries on until you’re dead.

This probably sounds a bit grim and off-putting if like most of the people out there you’re a virgin where

death’s concerned: but for us seasoned Forcemen death is just part of our lives. The logic is pretty

simple, after all. When you want a meal cooked up, and on hand you’ve got a trained cook and a guy

who’s never tried cooking, which one do you choose? Right. So when you want someone to go out and

probably get himself killed defending you or filling your enemies with holes ... that’s the core of Force

training. Anyone loaded down with gut-fear—hormone squirts from glands with a case of the

squitters—is going to be thinking about himself instead of the fighting; someone like that just can’t do a

clean, efficient kill. Poker players learn to keep emotion out of their faces, they say in the Force, and we

learn to keep ours out of our glands.

So I lay there in the tank and craned my neck to see how the foot was growing. The regenerator fluid is

thick, yellowish, and murky, but I could see I’d already sprouted a neat bunch of tarsal bones, coated

with a misty jelly where the flesh was starting to creep back over them. The fluid filled my mouth and

nostrils and lungs, which no doubt were healing at a good rate. The only real quarrel I’ve got with this

death-and-regeneration business is that it’s boring: even for fiddling little injuries the process can take

hours. Once I was cut not so neatly in half by a riot-gun and spent five whole days growing a new me,

from the belly down, like some stupid flatworm. Learning to die and live again is a necessary thing,

though. Like they told us on the induction course, deep down in all our genes we’ve got this locked-in

program that shriekssurvival when death’s about, and shrieks it so loud that you can’t hear your other

thoughts. Only way to stop that and get efficient is to get used to dying ... and then, maybe, you can start

thinking about promotion.

That one had been my forty-sixth death. I reckoned I was used to it.

They let me out of the sickbay in the end, after all the usual unpleasantness (lying there in the tank is

dreamy and nice if you can turn off your brain awhile, but being disconnected isn’t so good). I marched

off on my own two tender feet—the treatment leaves you uncalloused, like a baby—feeling ready to rush

that laser again and this time smear the crew good and proper. I’d been in some of those bunkers myself,

of course. Sooner or later the crew always get smeared.

Next day we’d be starting a fresh course, Guerrilla II, on how to improvise your own nukes—the trick,

I’d heard, is to get your charge of plute-oxide fuel shaped and imploded before the Pu poisoning catches

up with you. Some of these courses are makework, I think, to soak up our spare energy, but they’re all

good fun. No need to catch up on studies that night, so I wandered into the bar for a juice and sat down

by Raggett, a new guy with only half a dozen deaths. He still wore the death-pips on his arm: I gave up

those decorations when they reached double figures, myself.

“Chess?” I said to be sociable. “Or we could grab a room for a bit of wargaming, if that doesn’t sound

too much like work.”

“I thought ... I thought I’d go into town,” said Raggett. He is a ratty little fellow, and he looked really

furtive when he said this. Men from the Force can go into town any time they don’t have classes or

training—it’s supposed to be a compliment, the brass trust us. But somehow there’s a kind of feeling in

the air, not even strong enough to call an unwritten rule, that the real pros don’t waste time outside the

complex. So I gave Raggett a twitch of my eyebrow, and he said, “I could use a woman.”

At that I remembered my last woman, maybe only three or four deaths into training, and at the same time

I remembered Mack, the long-server who’d taken me into town back then out of sheer kindness (it had

beenhis first time in years—like me now, he’d slipped out of the habit) and warned me where I’d likely

be rolled, or poxed, or both. Mack, poor guy: he was wasted in one of the Continental raids. No pickup

for recycling—you know what they say: it wasFrance and meat’s short there.

“How about the two of us going?” I said. “Town’s not healthy when there’s just one of you, and I think I

know a couple of places.”

“Well ... thanks, Jacklin! Hoped you’d say that. Can I get you another?”

I let him buy me a juice I didn’t really want, and he told me that the latest stats had been posted, which I

knew already only I was feeling friendly. Seventy-two percent of the new intake had dropped out on

their first combat trial. Psych discharge: some people just can’t take dying, you know, and most of that

seventy-two percent wouldn’t be much use for anything afterward. They sometimes said ... well, never

mind that. It made me feel closer to Raggett, even with all those Ds of seniority.

“—great stuff,” he was saying. “The vocal synth is really out of this world. You heard it?”

I blinked. “Heard what? ... Oh, a new tape. Sorry, friend, but music doesn’t do anything for me. I used

to follow the charts a long time ago, but I never get the chance these days.”

There’s always something new out ofAfrica in the music line, even if you don’t hear much of the

homegrown stuff these days.

“I was wondering about that,” Raggett said. “I’ve noticed you seniors mostly stay away from the audio

room, and I mean, you know, is this some goddamn unwritten rule I don’t know about?”

I told him the truth, which was that I didn’t know much about it either. “After I’d been in the Force

awhile, the things I did before didn’t seem too important. You get this feeling of being really in touch here,

on the ball, keeping ahead of classes and scoring high in combat trials. Especially those. I mean, it feels a

whole lot better inside than music and such.”

Raggett’s eyebrows crawled together, halfway to a frown, and I wondered if he was planning to give up

all his piddling hobbies right away. I started wondering a couple of other things too, but they swam down

out of reach inside my head before I could net them.

“Let’s go into town, then,” I said.

The streets were much the same, the lights were different. More of the shielded power lines get cut up

every year—maintenance isn’t worth the effort outside the enclaves. The back streets were still choked

with the hulks of old cars; the route through them came back to me bit by bit as we went along, and I

managed to keep the plan in my head a turning or so in front of our feet. Sooner than was comfortable,

we were going through zones where the lighting was just about nonexistent.London ’s been a mess since

long before the Force took over. I remember thinking that this part of town had gone even further

downhill since my last time. Some places, back alleys especially, we were picking our way just by the

nova lights in the sky. And then, as our footsteps sounded grittily in one quiet and smelly spot, there was

a scraping of feet and three punks jumped us. Leftovers from a smashed Freedom gang, maybe. It turns

out the Force technique of going all out and not caring about getting dead or injured works fine in

unarmed combat too—I was a wide-open target as my fingers went in a V into the first guy’s eyes and

my right boot into the second’s groin, while whatever Raggett did to the third left him a screaming lump

until I kicked him to sleep.

It was hard to see in that thin mucky light, as we stood breathing hard over the bodies, but it seemed

they were pretty young. Should’ve joined the Force if they wanted action—or maybe they’d tried and

weren’t up to it. As fighters they hadn’t been much: I came out of it with just a dislocated finger which,

thanks to the training, didn’t bother me too much as I reset it.

“Hope they’re not maimed for life,” Raggett said as we went on, still scanning in front, behind, on both

sides, the automatic way you learn. I guessed two of them might be and the third wouldn’t be walking

straight for something like a week (no tanks for slummies, you bet). So what? They put themselves up as

targets and we cooperated nicely by knocking them down. Good practice, too.

Then we were at the House, a place looking like any dingy terrace house in these slums if you didn’t

happen to know. I pushed the squeaky doorcom button and said, “Two guys here looking for company.”

There was a pause while, I guessed, a bootleg black-light camera checked us over; then the door buzzed

and clicked open. Inside it was like the foyer of some small, dingy club—or hotel if there were any of

those left. The oil lamps leaked a yellow, smelly light. An ugly-looking receptionist who probably knew

something about unarmed combat himself asked us what specs we wanted. A whiff of the death-happy

feeling as I looked him over: he was tough, sure, but I guessed I could take him, no sweat...

“Blonde,” Raggett said eagerly. “Not over thirty—no, twenty-five.”

I remembered a name from that visit all those deaths ago. “Cathy,” I said. We slapped down the

oversized wads of Force scrip he asked for, took the keys, and headed up the stairs.

What the hell am I doing here?I thought outside the door. The key rattled in the lock; I tapped a

warning as I turned the handle, and as the door swung in, a choking blast of stale perfume came out. It

took me straight back to the bunker and the HF exhaust for a second ... Inside, it wasn’t the Cathy I

remembered, but she was just as efficient, coming to me with a real-looking smile asking if she could help

me get my clothes off. I like efficiency: she was an expert in her trade just the way I was in mine. In no

time at all we were lying side by side on the huge bed while I looked closely at her gray eyes and pale

yellow hair, and decided she was quite a good looker, really.

We chatted a while, lying there. She said professionally nice things about how I was big and strong and

so on, and I told her she looked great, and I was a Forceman who hadn’t been into town for a few

years. She gave me an odd sort of sidelong look then.

“You know, we don’t see very many old-timers here,” she said.

“Hell, I won’t be thirty for a while,” I said, grinning.

“Mmm ... yes, quite babyfaced. But you know what they say about the Forcemen who’ve been under

training a long while.”

I didn’t know what they said about them, and asked. She twisted her face into a funny little frown, and

said, “You maybe paid to talk all night? Can’t you do that in your very own cell or whatever they keep

you in?”

“OK, let’s get on with it.” I wrapped my arm around her, and her hands started doing things up and

down me and it was all very friendly, soft, and warm. She stroked me for maybe a quarter of an hour and

I stroked her back, with a little of my mind away, thinking about improvised nukes and next day’s

course, and by and by she stopped. She just lay there with her head on my chest and sniffled. I felt a

damp spot over my ribs then, and lifted up her head carefully. She was crying.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

“Something wrong with you. You ... you Forcemen! You’renot men, you’re not. For Christ’s sake,

don’t you ever get it up?”

It came back to me then that that was part of it all, and I thought this was funny since I’d had a bit of a

hard-on only that morning when I was rushing the laser bunker. But now I’d hurt her professional pride

or something, so I told her I was tired and would try harder, and she stroked me and sucked me and

tickled me without anything special happening. In the end I got out of there and waited in the foyer until

Raggett came down with a big smile.

I thought about it all on the way back through all the rust and the concrete gone to sand, and it came to

me that maybe when you get used to dying and everything, then you’ve got up above all the little

weaknesses. I felt, you know, I’d really matured. The next day I put in for promotion.

Two

Waiting in the small gray room, I found my guts were in free fall while the rest of me stayed still. It’s not

logical, but these interviews with Admin are tense things. Combat officers you live with, you die with, and

we get along. Admin ... Here I was, very flash in the black dress uniform with all its silver braid and D

stars, a morale booster if there ever was one, and the thought of the interview was vibrating me up to just

short of the full-scale shakes. Waiting to have a tooth pulled had taken me that way in the old times.

It’s a place like most Complex rooms—square, the walls two-tone gray and glossy up to shoulder level,

doors in a third gray, one blank and here the other one saying ADMIN. CAPT. SINCLAIR. A couple

of chairs in gray plastic, a rubbery gray floor, making five shades of gray altogether—six if you counted

the way my face felt. These twitchy civilians: twitchiness is catching. I wasn’t death-happy yet. I sat

counting the grays, waiting, drifting off into thoughts about last week’s combat trial against the laser

bunker...

Then there was that tiny click-scrape of the slack being taken up in a loose door handle. Reflex took

over. As ADMIN. CAPT. SINCLAIR’s door handle started to turn, I snapped upright, twisting to

expose minimum side profile to the opening crack of the door, left hand braced against the wall, right

slapping my belt as it scrabbled for the shock gun—Ah.Special Force Regulations 3/45b: Weapons

may not be carried with dress uniform, “weapons” comprising all classes of offensive implement

listed in Appendix H . I caught myself then, and dropped out of the reflex sequence.Civilians!

Forcemen donot open doors at you, suddenly, like that. By the time the tall gray door had swung all the

way open, I was standing and looking what I hoped was relaxed. A balding secretary peered at me,

sniffed, and said, “Captain Sinclair would like to see you now.”

“Thanks.” I followed him through another gray room thick with filing cabinets; it was only six or seven

paces and in that time he glanced at me over his shoulder twice. Twitchy, twitchy. Another door...

“Forceman Jacklin,” he said into the room beyond, and I went in.

This was an even more cluttered office; I could guess what some of the clutter was hiding. Admin does

not trust Combat even a little bit. Captain Sinclair was sitting hard up against the far wall, behind a

massive desk that looked like something left over from the Siegfried Line and was probably a sight

tougher. She herself was round-faced, blue-eyed, hair gray like vanadium steel. We’d met before.

“Forceman Jacklin,” she told me, tossing me a smile as if it were a banana. Admin also thinks, or

pretends to think, that Combat men are plain stupid.

“Yes, Captain.”

“Please do sit down.”

“Yes, Captain.” There was one hard gray chair standing before the desk; I tried to shift it casually to one

side and found it locked in place. Score one for Admin. I sat down, automatically scanning walls, floor,

ceiling (nothing immediately over or under the chair, or nothing visible). Sinclair nibbled gently at her

bottom lip.

“You’re applying for promotion to combat lieutenant.” Fine, great, first she tells me my name and then

comes up with the big punch line about why I’m here. I nodded, half my mind still wondering what

bothered me about the portable electric fan sitting on a filing cabinet to the left.

“The reason for your application?”

I knew that one all right. “Advancement of Force career.” That fan...

A shuffle of papers. “This is very interesting. Yes. You would certainly seem to be well qualified in

course work, training ground practicals, yes: with one exception, the Anomalous Physics I course.”

The fan was trained right on my chair, not on Sinclair’s desk, and there was a black spot on the central

boss between the blades. Probably a dart gun. Anomalous Physics I—ah yes, that was the MT course.

“That’s all right,” I said too quickly. I’d been in the tank after theCopenhagen raid all that week, but my

good old drinking buddy Skeld had sneaked out the course texts and read them to me. Interesting stuff ...

wait a minute, that material was restricted. Get Skeld into trouble if know about it.

“According to my records, Jacklin, you were hospitalized during AP-I last year. Have you ever been

exposed to this material?” She began to fiddle with some electronic components on the massive desk.

“I can read up on MT in two days if you’ll give me temporary CONF clearance, Captain.”

“Then you aren’t familiar with matter transmission equipment, jammers, nullbombs, or any of the related

devices?” It was more of a statement than a question, but I cleverly answered with a long-drawn out

“We-e-e-ll...”

“You aren’t ... Good.”

Good? It seemed the right time to look puzzled, and I did; also just then I registered something I’d been

not quite hearing ever since I sat down, a thin whine from, probably, inside the desktop. Even money it

was the charge circuitry of a laser somewhere in there. Sinclair must worry a lot about death-happy

Combat men.

“I’d better explain to you what all this is about,” she said. “There is a highly hazardous assignment—“

“I volunteer,” I said without thinking about it. Hazardous meant you maybe got killed. So what? That

was the job.

She frowned, clicking the electrical bits in her hand. “Please. You’re supposed to be intelligent, for a

Combat man: let me finish. This assignment has a security classification so high that even the classification

is classified. They don’t want your killer ability or any of that nonsense; they want a Forceman with a high

D rating, reasonable intelligence, good reflexes and --what are these ?”

She shot out her hand with the components rolling on the palm. One was an MT distortion tube just like

in the manual’s pictures. I showed off my classy reflexes and didn’t hesitate before saying “Don’t know

... electrical parts?” with a blank look.

“Yes. An open mind, shall we say, on MT technology.” She paused and looked at me with head a little

on one side. About then I decided that what looked like woodworm this side of the desktop—a metal

desk! -- must be outlets for unfriendly gas or loaded needles. So don’t go in over the top of the desk.

That made three defenses.

“What’s the assignment?” I said.

“I don’t have details. Except that it involves the space program.”

“I thought they canceled all that a hundred-odd years back. When the power started to give out.”

“So did I. Do you still volunteer?”

“I volunteer, Captain.” I wanted to stand up and salute snappily, but when I tensed to do that she

jerked, and one small hand ran like a spider to a button set in the desktop. Captain Sinclair was still

worried.

Once in a while a Forceman goes death-happy. He doesn’t mind pain, he doesn’t mind death at all any

more, and what’s left to do to him? Usually he won’t go for his mates, though; the old bad feeling about

Admin comes bubbling up and he wastes a few ofthem . So Admin are scared of Combat, which makes

things worse—the way dogs are readier to bite people they know are afraid of them. Admin would

surely like to deal with Combat at a safe distance, behind armorglass walls or CC3V links—but that

would be bad formorale , wouldn’t it? And so they have their little personal defenses.

“How does all this tie in with my promotion?” I said, staying seated and very still, like a good boy. But

how did I look to her? Hard muscles, wavy brown hair, baby-blue eyes and a long nose that bent a little

to the left—did that add up to the identikit of a death-happy killer?

“Yes.” (She used “yes” as punctuation, I thought.) “Briefly, the suggestion is that you assume the rank of

lieutenant for the period of this assignment, to be made permanent should you return and then

satisfactorily complete the course we’ve discussed. Yes. That seems to be the proposal.” She was

fingering the AP components intensely; maybe being in the room with a Combat expert was getting her

down all the more. Which led me to thinking how one should bounce right off the chair to start with, as

ten to one there were hypos concealed in the seat, and—“Yes, sounds great,” I told her—and guessing

the laser aperture to bethere you’d have to dodge it and roll under the line of fire of whatever it was in

the fan, around the side of the desk to avoid the gas or needles in the desktop which looked rigged to fire

straight up, do it fast and she’d find there’s no time to touch that silly defense button—

The calculation must have showed, because that white hand scuttled for the button again. Surely she

didn’t expect a Forcemannot to solve her defenses when handed the problem—any more than, if given a

form, she’d stop herself at least working out how to fill it in. As an academic exercise.

“Yes,” she said again, and her left hand stroked up and down her jawline. “That would seem to cover it.

Yes. I’ll recommend your application, Forceman Jacklin: just a formality.”

“So it’s back to duties until the official word comes through?”

A little smile, adding to her wrinkles. Stupid Forceman, not knowing that! “No indeed. As a

recommendee, you’re already under the security umbrella. You’ll be isolated from non-cleared personnel

until further notice.”

That was bad. There are rituals that help keep the Force together: a one-man assignment, you say your

good-byes and buy a few rounds of juice, name the pals who get your pay balance and wargame credits

if they don’t recover enough of you...

“Has it got to be like that? Captain.”

“Yes. These are our orders.” A very self-satisfied look.

I wanted to scare her then, wanted to dance around that booby-trapped desk, tweak her nose and say

Boo! But that would mean demerits and removal from the assignment (and a good lot of jeering from the

boys as well, if she killed me on the way): I was curious now, I wanted to know whatever was going on

in space to need a force of, it seemed, one. So I swallowed and said: “Permission to leave, Captain?”

“Dismissed, Forceman.” And the finger right on the button, tense and terrified, as I got up very slowly,

very carefully, and went to the door. Just before I reached it, I stopped short for half a second and could

almost hear her jump. Maybe she could almost hear me chuckle. Outside her secretary was waiting,

twitchy but not so twitchy as ADMIN. CAPT. SINCLAIR, to lead me away. Off to isolation until I got a

briefing from someone who actually knew something.

Once or twice in training there’d been fights in the bar or more often in the game room, nothing to write

home about; two, three people killed, on their feet next day to face the jokes about “Hey, you’re getting

slow—“ Culprits got tossed into the brig to cool off for a week; the brig was another of those bare gray

rooms with a smell of disinfectant and no distractions at all to keep you from thinking what a wicked

person you were. (Some of the fellows would always say afterward that they got themselves brigged on

purpose—it was supposed to give you an edge in Sensory Deprivation I.) And the isolated quarters they

gave me now weren’t one damn bit different from the brig. Temporary rank hath its privileges. I could

almost hear Sinclair chuckle.

Three

The thing we all hate about Security is the hit-and-miss way they operate. Sometimes you feel it’s like a

bomb with a one-direction trembler; kick itthis way and nothing happens, touch it with a feather onthat

side and blam. So when we had this bet back in my early Force days and smuggled out the IR laser to

burn our names on a few walls in the no-go area south of Oxford street, it was all ho-ho and what

naughty boys you are, don’t do it again. But the next week, Shuttle the Armorer left a sheet of weapon

specs in the Force bar, real low-level restricted stuff—and at the court-martial they busted him back to

trainee. There is a trick they use in grenade training, when you’re throwing clear over the training-ground

rocks (or sometimes it’s the maze ground at what wasHampton Court ) and the other men’s grenades

are coming back at you. You dive and dodge and throw, and once in a while someone forgets to pull the

pin and you get a spare grenade coming over. If you like, you can arm it and throw it back. Only

somewhere out there is an instructor with some very special grenades whose firing delay is not ten

seconds nor five but about half a millisec, and he surely does not pull the pin before lobbing it gently to

you. I heard this funny joke went right back to World War I. So you’re out of grenades and there’s one

lying there and all you can do is grab it and ... Finding you’ve tangled with Security is very like that bright

and clear-focused moment when you start to pull the pin.

In real life, of course, it’s worse than that: Security works backward when it wants to. There we were,

the month beforeCopenhagen , wargaming the strike plan for the city cleanup, tinkering the creaky

suggestions of Admin into workable shape—and Security got cold feet. Thump thump thump, they went,

stamping SECRET/MILIT/LEVEL5 all over the working papers, and we were all in the retroactive shit

for talking classified material with nonparticipant Forcemen who happened to be there at the time.

It wasCopenhagen that made me spend that week pulling myself together, as they say, after the riot-gun

got me. Along came Skeld with the course material I was missing, mostly stuff on recognizing Anomalous

Physics equipment (prohibited, dangerous, destroy on sight) with some notes on the few AP things safe

enough to use. Keeping up made good sense at the time: now Security was coming from behind, the way

they like to. Captain Sinclair, as subtle as a hole in the road, had made it pretty damned obvious that if

I’d taken the AP-I course I wouldn’t be getting this big chance. Which was why I should keep very quiet

and not even think about it. Which was why I couldn’t stop myself thinking about it.

It all came back to me so easily as I sat in the room that wasn’t the brig. My injuries had all been down

in the belly, to put it gently (further down than that, they hadn’t been able to recover the pieces): the tank

seal pressed against my collar bone and left neck and head sticking out as though I were an iron lung

case. I could even lift my head and squint down through the slimy yellow to where rag-ends of me were

floating free and growing slowly together. It was a mess. Skeld brought me the texts and turned the pages

every night, and so I learned how AP was a dead-end branch of physics that had started out hunting for

a matter transmitter, a gadget to flick your payloads fromhere tothere without covering any space or time

in between. (What a warhead delivery system that would be!)

MT was impossible, everyone decided. It came flat up against specialand general relativity, half a dozen

conservation laws, and also common sense. This was where things got knotty, because MT worked in a

perverse sort of way when it shouldn’t have ... what they reckoned after all the disasters was that the

laws of physics and the universal constants were like settings on a big switchboard—condition codes for

a computer that was the whole universe. MT worked by changing the settings, altering the laws,

buggering up the universe. You can maybe just wiggle at the settings a little and something very odd

happens to electromagnetic waves—that was the jammer we still used; it threw 99 percent of our battle

electronics on the scrapheap and landed the Force with those missile guidance assignments we were

supposed to keep in training for. Another loophole in the old physics comes when you tinker with the

speed of light; quantum mechanical laws start falling like dominoes until all of a sudden it’s bye-bye to the

traffic regulations that keep electrons from falling into the nuclei of their atoms and going blooey. The

effect of this one, luckily for a lot of us, is localized, but it’s still close to total conversion of matter, total

annihilation, the nullbomb. It was a nullbomb that cracked northeastAmerica last century when their

Project Hideyhole researched a bit too far—and that was the end of the old superpower balance. Five

days of World War III because the rest of oldNorth America blamed the Soviets for that megamegaton

blast ... but the EEC went neutral and pulled through somehow—

There’s a section in the course book that really boggles me.

I’ve had the recall training, I can call up every page, but this paragraph always looks twice the size of the

rest:

From the examples given above, it may be seen that the restrictions on functional AP systems are few in

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

TheSpaceEaterbyDavidLangford Copyright©Copyright1982byDavidLangford ForPaulBarnettwhowasfirstmaddenedintosuggestingIshouldwriteabookandPeterWestonwhosedelusionitwasthatIshouldwritethisoneChapterOneoriginallyappearedinslightlydifferentforminTHOR’SHAMMER,editedbyReginaldBretnor,AceBooks,1979.Conte...

展开>> 收起<<

David Langford - The Space Eater.pdf

共141页,预览29页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

David Langford - The Space Eater

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: