James Blish - Mission To The Heart Stars

VIP免费

2024-12-19 0 0 279.46KB 62 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Foreword

You have probably often had the experience of en-countering, apparently for the first time, a new word

- and then running into it three or four more times within just the next few days. Early in this book, for

instance, you may make your first encounter with the word 'processing'; it means - movement of the axis

of rotation. It's a very common word in astronomy and so, also, a part of the vo-cabulary of the space

age. Hence you will run up against it again promptly. In fact, you've probably seen it often before, but

your eye skipped over it because of its re-semblance to 'processing'. Now you've become, so to speak,

sensitized to it, and you marvel that it pops up so frequently in the first week that you've recognized its

existence.

Writers will tell you that the same thing often happens in the realm of ideas. You may not have thought

much about a subject before, nor have seen much written about it, either; but only sit down to plan a

book about it, and references to it appear as explosively as popcorn. Three or four writers have

described the process to me in the same words: 'It seems as if things just fall into my hands when I need

them.'

I had a gratifying experience of this kind with this book. For several years, I have been wondering about

the future of individual human freedom in a high-energy culture like ours. Regardless of the kind of

political or economic system under which you find it, the high-energy culture (a term for which I think I

am solely responsible) is alike everywhere in certain important ways. The most obvious of these is that it

tends to consume more and more energy as time goes on, and to expend more and more energy;

aeroplanes go higher and faster and gulp more and more fuel, cities grow and demand more electricity,

and, alas, the amount of de-struction that can be released by one bomb increases with-out any visible

limits.

One not quite so obvious result of this is that as the years go by, things also tend to happen faster and

faster, and to require decisions more quickly. These trends in turn have two additional effects. First, they

tend to concentrate the power to make a decision in the hands of fewer and fewer people, many of them

people whose very names we do not know. Second, they shorten the time in which a decision can be

made, so as to make it impossible for these few executives and technicians to consult the rest of us, even

though we shall all be profoundly affected by whatever they do or don't do.

I didn't arrive at any solution for this very complicated problem, but it did seem to me that the chances of

worrying out an answer might be improved if I could at least spread the worry around a little. A

science-fiction novel looked like a good way - indeed, the traditional way - to raise the ques-tions; and, I

thought, it should be a novel for young people, who will be living with the problem even more intimately

than my generation has had to do. Furthermore, in a novel nobody expects or even welcomes blanket

answers. I could simply prowl around the margins of the problem, giving the reader a look at it from as

many different angles as my in-genuity could manage.

I had written not quite half of the manuscript when there arrived in the post the Autumn, 1962, issue of

Technology and Culture, the official journal of the Society for the His-tory of Technology. This issue

was devoted to a conference on 'the technological order' which had been sponsored by the

Encyclopaedia Britannica the preceding March in Santa Barbara, California. It was a 279-page gold

mine of schol-arly discussion of the very question I was writing about - including a paper by the eminent

French philosopher, Jacques Ellul, which explored in detail a part of the problem that I had introduced

into the novel just the preceding night!

And yet, in the words of my friends, it just fell into my hands. I was not a member of the Society for the

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

History of Technology at the time, nor had I ordered the issue; it was sent to me out of the blue by

Britannica Vice-President John S. Robling because, he said, 'I know you share with the editors of the

194-year-oldEncyclopaedia Britannica an interest in the problems of our rapidly expanding

tech-nological age.' He was right about that, but I didn't know how he knew it, since I have never met

Mr Robling. Then I found the name of L. Sprague de Camp, an old friend of mine and a science-fiction

writer of stature, listed on the Society's advisory council

As a story, this book is an independent novel, but readers who would like to know more about Jack

Loftus, Sandbag Stevens, Dr Langer, Sylvia McCrary, and their odd friends, the Angels, will find them

also in a book calledThe Star Dwellers (Faber & Faber, 1962). This tells the story of the Earth's first

encounter with the Angels, and how a treaty was negotiated with them, in much greater detail than I could

summarize it inMission to the Heart Stars. It was another of science fiction's masters, Lester del Rey,

who suggested to me after readingThe Star Dwellers that the alliance between the Angels and the Earth

might well be more powerful than my central galactic federation - a lovely idea, and one that could be

wedded usefully to my then rather hazy plan to explore the future of freedom in a high-energy culture. I'm

much indebted - as often before - to both of these romantically named colleagues.

Finally, I have found two comments in the scholarly quarterly that 'fell into my hands' that seem to belong

here -at least, they don't belong in the body of the novel.

One of these is a complaint by Aldous Huxley, who asked the conference what a man of letters might do

about the problem of technology confronting us. He added: 'The rational side of man, with its scientific

and technological expressions, gets little literary space. It is curious that science and technology have

always occupied so small a place in literature ... This is all the more extraordinary when one considers

that literature is supposed to hold the mirror up to life. In life, people spend a great deal of time involved

in the technology of the period in which they live. They work, and their jobs are connected with

technology and the organizations technology engenders. Yet one sees little evidence of this in literature.'

I find this an exceedingly depressing remark coming from an author who made one of his earliest

successes - both critical and popular - with a science-fiction novel,Brave New World, devoted almost

entirely to the future of the technological explosion, and who has written often about it since. Science

fiction has always been pre-eminently the literature of the impact of science and technology, present and

possible, upon the lives of those who have to work with it or upon whom, in many instances, it is inflicted.

If, for reasons of literary quality or any other reasons which may have occurred to him, Mr Huxley chose

to ignore the millions of words of magazine science fiction that have been published since 1926, that's

entirely his affair; but he was, after all, an ex-countryman of H. G. Wells, who can't be said to have

ignored the problem either, and who has had many distinguished successors.

I feel a little encouraged in my present project, even though it raises many more questions than it

answers, by the second of the two comments. This turned out to be the very last words spoken at the

Britannica conference. They are by Ralph W. Tyler, who said: 'We wish to leave both a fruitful world

and difficult problems for posterity to deal with, and in so doing achieve more nearly for them their human

potential. If we solve the problems for our children, they will not grow.'

That, though I didn't know it before, is both my excuse for this book and for the inordinate length of this

Foreword.

James Blish202 Riverside Drive New York, NY 10025

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

CHAPTER ONE

Fear and Flight

It was Jack Loftus's watch when theAriadne grounded on Phobos, the innermost of the two moons of

Mars.

The first thing he did was to lock the slim, wasp-waisted little cruiser firmly to the jagged rocky face of

the satellite, for Phobos has no gravity worth mentioning; it is only five miles in diameter.

Besides, it is hollow. It was that oddity which enabled Jack to moor theAriadne to it, for he knew that

only two thousand feet below the rock's surface, there was a sheet of atomically pure steel into which the

Ariadne's field could set its invisible teeth. Ordinarily that magnetic field was used only in space, to

secure the footing of anyone who might want to venture out on to the hull in a space suit to make repairs.

But atomically pure steel is theoretically the most sensitive of all known substances to magnetism -

theoretic-ally, because no human being had yet succeeded in making more than a few needles of it. The

inner lining of Phobos had been made by... someone else.

The next thing Jack should have done was to have called Dr Howard Langer, theAriadne's master. Dr

Langer was not even asleep. As a matter of fact, he was playing a stiff game of double Klondike with his

cadet understudy, Jerry 'Sandbag' Stevens, in the airlock, the only chamber aboard ship large enough to

accommodate two men sitting facing each other across a lapboard.

But Jack did not call him yet. There was no particular hurry, and besides, Jack wanted to look at Mars.

Less than a year ago, Jack had been scores of light years away from his home sun, in the heart of the

Greater Coal Sack nebula; but he had never touched down upon any of Sol's own family of planets

except Earth itself. The ex-pedition to the Coal Sack had been his first trip into space, and this mission to

Phobos was his second.

Mars loomed before him, filling the whole field of view. Actually, of course, the planet was above him,

but theAr-iadne's skin was unbroken by portholes; vision outside, in any direction, was provided by a

sextet of television screens, all at eye level. The vast landscape, only 3,700 miles away, moved

majestically across the screen in what seemed to be the wrong direction, for Phobos moves so rapidly

through the Martian skies that it rises in the west and sets in the east. Like most of the many moons with

which the planets are provided, Phobos goes around Mars in the same direction as the red world rotates,

but it goes a great deal faster. The day, on Mars, is twenty-four hours and thirty-seven minutes long, but

Phobos has started on its third circuit of the planet by the time that day is over.

The landscape was complex and difficult to make sense of, even over this short a distance. It was

summer in the equatorial latitudes over which Phobos was speeding, and the steady, dull ochre of the

Martian deserts had given way to broad areas of deep blue-green, some of them almost as big as

Australia but with much more diffuse boundaries. The colour was provided by the lichens - a wedding

between a fungus and a one-celled alga, the only vegetation which had been able to survive the long

dying of a once verdant world.

Stitching together the blue-green pseudo-continents was the elaborate network of the 'canals', which

were, alas, not canals at all. If they had turned out to be real, water-carrying canals, Jack would not have

been on Phobos now, and, in fact, the whole history of the Earth might have been en-tirely different.

It had been the Italian astronomer, Schiaparelli, Jack re-membered somewhat dimly, who had first seen

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

these strange markings and had dubbed themcanali, by which he meant 'channels'. The words, however,

passed unchanged into En-glish as canals', and the American astronomer, Percival Lowell, later decided

that the markings must be the final titanic effort of a race of intelligent beings to provide water to a planet

becoming increasingly arid. It was a poetic con-cept, but very few of Lowell's colleagues could be found

to agree to it, in part because most of them simply could not see, through the telescope, more than a few

of the hundreds of lines Lowell drew upon his maps of Mars. Some of his confreres were so rude as to

suggest that Lowell couldn't see them, either.

When the age of space flight arrived a century ago, Lowell was partly vindicated. His maps of the

network turned out to be nearly eighty per cent accurate; his must have been one of the sharpest pairs of

eyes since Tycho Brahe's. But the reality behind the lines was far stranger than anything that Lowell or his

few supporters had imagined ... stranger -and far more tragic.

About this, Lowell had turned out to be both right and wrong at once. The lines were not canals. But

they should have been.

There had indeed been a race of sentient Martians, and more than half a million years ago, they had

foreseen -exactly as Lowell had imagined - that their world, which was too small to hold on to the

oxygen and the water that had been given it at its creation, was doomed unless some-thing was done.

What the Martians chose to do might have been called an act of insanity but for the many precedents for

it in the history of Earth. They did not build canals. Instead, they used all the accumulated scientific

knowledge of their ancient race, which had reached its peak of civi-lization long before human beings had

learned the use of fire, to lay out, over the whole face of Mars, something which their surviving records

referred to as 'the Diagram of Power'.

Though the archaeologists could not be entirely sure after the passage of so many millennia, the

significance of the Diagram appeared to be religious, even magical. It was perhaps a little like a

horoscope, but one intended to freeze the future rather than to predict it. The construction of the total

Inscription took three Martian centuries - twelve hun-dred years in Earth time - and drained the last

energies and resources of the dying race.

Afterwards, the oxygen and the water vapour continued to leak away from Mars into space, and in a

very short time, as geological periods go, the planet was a desert; but by that time there were no

Martians left to mourn it.

The verdict had to be: Suicide through superstition. But Earthmen were in no position to condemn it.

They had only to look back at the Pyramids of Egypt to see its like.

Other eyes, however, had been watching the whole of the tragedy as it happened. Their owners did not

hesitate to condemn; nor did they bother to help. Those eyes, hidden within the heart of Phobos, had

recorded the drama without a hint of emotion, and, an almost unthinkable distance away, the brains

behind the eyes had icily decided that the Martians should be allowed to die by their own hands. It was

not the first time - not by many hundreds - that those brains had come to a similar decision. Now they

were think-ing about the Earth...

'What are you thinking about?' a voice behind Jack said suddenly.

Jack started and swung around in the pilot's seat. The voice, of course, was that of Dr Langer, who

stood in the entranceway to the control cabin, smiling a little wryly.

'I'm sorry, sir. I've never been this close to Mars before. I guess I was feeling a little overwhelmed.'

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

'Small wonder,' Dr Langer said. 'That wasteland down there is a monument to an immense and terrible

history. The Earth has nothing to match it, and let's pray that it never will. Are you sure that that's all that

was on your mind? I think this is the very first time I've ever caught you asleep at the switch.'

'No, sir,' Jack confessed. 'I was thinking about the - the arrogance of this interstellar federation or

whatever it is, those people in the centre of the galaxy who hollowed out Phobos to spy on the Martians,

and then let them die with-out so much as a sympathy card. All at once it made me mad. I still don't

agree with what we're supposed to be up to here - doggone it, I think the whole idea is crazy - but I

think I'm beginning to understand it better.'

'Go back three spaces,' Langer said gently. 'We don't know that Phobos never communicated with the

Martians. I think the chances are very good that it did. Bear in mind that the observer asteroid that's

watching us tried to talk to us as far back as 1935. We didn't recognize the signals then, and since then

we've chosen not to - we've just been eaves-dropping. The Martians may have made a very similar

deci-sion. After all, they must have known what Phobos was -they had had space travel for many

thousands of years be-fore they began to lay out the Diagram of Power. Look at what they built on the

back of our own Moon.'

'The Death Machine?'

'That's what we call it. But remember, we don't know what it was actually for. We only gave it that name

because it was so deadly to explore, but that's almost surely a - well, call it a side-effect. No, I think it's

almost certain that the Martians knew that help was available, if they were willing to ask for it. But they

didn't. They were committed to suicide, and once the Heart Stars saw that, they didn't try to intervene

any further. After all, they had seen it all happen before, hundreds and hundreds of times.'

'We wouldn't have let it happen,' Jack said stubbornly.

'No,' Langer said, seating himself in the navigator's chair next to Jack, 'but we aren't a million years old,

either. Our standards of compassion may be wrong, or at least may be inferior to some over-riding moral

standard of which we can have no conception. That's not something that I like to think about, but then,

there are lots of things in the universe that I don't like very much. Nevertheless, I have to learn to live with

them. The Martians didn't. Down there, you see -the results: a universal desert, covered with meaningless

scribblings.'

Jack continued to stare at the slowly processing, colourful map for a long moment. He said at last: 'Well,

all right. But all the same, Dr Langer, I'm scared. I don't want to meet anybody who could pass judgment

on a whole planet like that, no matter how much smarter they are than I am. But that's what we've got to

do.'

'I'm scared, too,' Langer said surprisingly. 'Inever thought that I would have to meet the problem of the

Heart Stars in my lifetime. After all, the Angels tell us that we have fifty thousand years of grace to go

before these Galactics -or whatever they call themselves - pass judgment upon the Earth. But, there's no

help for it. Suit up, Jack. We had better get on the job. I'm leaving Jerry in charge of the ship.'

Jack got up obediently, but Dr Langer, in an unpre-cedented moment of indecision, remained seated,

staring at the vivid, glowing landscape of dead Mars. Then he shut the screen off and swung away from

it.

'From now on we're going to have to watch our steps,' he said sombrely. 'Do you know the name of this

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

little rockball we're on, Jack?'

'Sure.'

'No, I mean the real name. What does Phobos mean?'

'Why -I guess I don't know.'

'Deimos and Phobos were the names of the two horses thatpulled the chariot of Mars, the god of War,'

Dr Langer said. 'The names were the Greek words for flight and fear. This is Fear we're about to

explore. I'm afraid it was well named.'

CHAPTER TWO

The Hollow Moon

Jack could no longer say with any certainty just when this adventure might have begun. Sometimes it

seemed to him that it ought to be dated back to that day in California when, while still a senior in high

school, he had definitely decided to become a foreign service cadet, or at least to the day when he had

been notified that he had passed the competitive examinations at Vallejo. Sometimes it seemed more

sensible to date it to the day, a little over two years later, when he had been apprenticed to Daniel Hart,

the United States Secretary for Space, whom Dr Langer served as trouble-shooter.

But actually, their presence on Phobos was essentially an outcome of the discovery of the Angels -

creatures of pure energy, rather like living ball-lightning - whose natural habitat was space, particularly

those turbulent regions like the Orion nebula and the Coal Sacks where new stars were being formed.

They were exquisitely beautiful, these shim-mering, fiery creatures, highly intelligent and even playful. Yet

they were awesome, too, considering that the youngest were some four million years old, and the oldest

possibly had participated in the First Cause which had given birth to the whole universe.

Dr Langer, Jack, and Sandbag had gone to the Greater Coal Sack nebula in theAriadne, charged with

the re-sponsibility of negotiating a treaty with the Angels, a re-sponsibility which, through a combination

of danger, accident, and bad judgment, had devolved largely upon Jack. Somehow he had managed to

bring it off. The treaty had been signed, and there were some hundreds of cadet Angels on the Earth at

the moment, including a friend of Jack's whom he had named HESPERUS.

Most of them were helping to run hydrogen fusion reac-tors. They did this from inside, for the

unthinkably furious nuclear processes by which the stars shine were as familiar and natural to them as

breathing.

The Angels had long been aware of the federation of stable civilizations that occupied the centre of the

galaxy and had been in contact with it. Essentially, however, they were indifferent to it, for to them even

this million-year-old interstellar society was ephemeral compared to the Angels themselves. They also

knew, of course, that the Heart Stars had given the Earth a hundred thousand years to prove itself stable

enough as a society to be worthy of being invited to join the galactic federation, and to them it probably

seemed a reasonable test period. Nevertheless, they had been sufficiently impressed by the mature way

in which the Earth-men had conducted themselves during the negotiations lead-ing towards the treaty to

recommend to the Heart Stars that the trial period be cut in half - a recommendation that would almost

surely be accepted, since not even the accumu-lated might and wisdom of the Heart Stars could hope for

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

an instant to survive the active displeasure of the Angels, who were masters of the energies of Creation

itself.

It was at this point that politics entered the picture. It would never have occurred to the Angels that, to

Man, fifty thousand years would still seem an intolerably long time. Yet it was, after all, more than five

times as long as the whole of Man's recorded history. On the other hand, it was bound to occur to

someone on Earth that the relationship between the Earth and the Heart Stars had, in fact, changed even

more drastically: that, by virtue of its alliance with the Angels, the Earth might now be actually more

powerful than the Heart Stars - or could be made to seem so.

Jack did not know exactly which high Earth official had come to this dangerous conclusion, though it was

clear to him that it had to be someone in the United Nations Sec-retariat, perhaps the Secretary-General

himself, unlike Sec-retary Nilssen though it sounded. He did know, because Secretary Hart had told him,

that Hart had argued firmly against the notion. Hart had thought it not only foolhardy, but in violation of

the spirit of the treaty with the Angels.

But Secretary Hart had been overruled. Once broached, the idea that it might be possible to gatecrash

the smug, coldly aloof, apparently invulnerable galactic federation by a show of force proved to be

irresistible to those in whose hands the decision rested, whoever they were. It seemed a grand

opportunity to show the Heart Stars that, though the Earth was only an ordinary planet of a minor sun

swimming far out in a backwater of the galaxy and the people of Earth were barely out of the cradle from

the point of view of gal-actic history, the Heart Stars could patronize the human race only at their peril.

The whole idea was a colossal piece of presumption loaded with unknowns, every one of which was a

possibility for disaster. It was clear that its sponsors knew this, clear first of all from the great care that

they had taken to preserve their anonymity and to conceal the whole course of action from the public,

and even from the middle echelons of government. It became more abundantly clear from the set of

instructions which had been given - through a reluctant, indeed a rebellious, Secretary Hart - to Dr

Langer.

He had been told to determine, as quietly as possible, just how strong a combination of the Earth and the

Angels might be against the Heart Stars, preferably without letting the Heart Stars suspect that any such

question had even been raised. How he went about it was up to him, but there was the limiting proviso

that he keep the budget well under two million dollars so as not to alert the General Assembly -let alone

the public - that this might in time become a major project. The orders did not say this explicitly. It was,

after all, the public's two million dollars. It was anticipated, the orders said instead, that Dr Langer would

hold down staff expenses during this preliminary phase of the investigation by recourse to the cadet

system.

This veiled directive explained the presence of Sandbag Stevens on Phobos. It did not quite explain

Jack's; he was, after all, Secretary Hart's understudy, not Dr Langer's. But the fact that they were on

Phobos at all was much easier to explain. They were about to explore the strength of the Heart Stars

through the major instrument that that vast fed-eration had made accessible to the solar system in which

men lived: the observer satellite that it had built to monitor the Martians and which still whirled intact

around the dying planet's equator, no higher up from the surface than the distance between New York

and San Francisco.

The inside of Phobos had often been explored before. The difference, this time, was that Dr Langer was

authorized to break silence, if he judged that necessary, and let the Heart Stars know that Earth was

looking back at them.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

By the tangerine-coloured light of Mars, Jack followed Dr Langer over the surface of Phobos. There

were no land-marks in this jumbled wilderness of rock, but Dr Langer seemed to know exactly where he

was going; perhaps he was following some sort of radio beacon. One thing was certain, however. It

would be very difficult to become lost on Phobos, for the total surface area was about the size of a

California truck farm, and besides, if one kept on walking in a straight line, one could completely

circumnavigate the little body in under three hours. To find theAriadne not even this would be necessary,

for, since Phobos always kept the same face turned towards Mars, there would be no need to bother

stumbling around on the dark side of the moonlet. All the same, Phobos was a gloomy and disquieting

place, and Jack would have been glad to be somewhere else ... even back at Vallejo.

Dr Langer stopped and raised an arm, the Mars light run-ning in glistening lines along the metal fabric of

the space suit. When Jack had closed the gap between them, he found the troubleshooter peering down

into a perfectly round hole, about eighteen feet in diameter, which seemed to have smooth-polished rock

walls; the bottom of the shaft was not visible.

'Is this it?' Jack said, almost whispering without being aware of it.

'Yes. Not very impressive, is it? But try throwing a stone at it.'

'Do you mean it?' Jack said.

'Sure. Try it.' Langer's voice chuckled drily. 'Things are not always what they seem. Especially not here.'

Jack bent and picked up a sizable boulder - with no effort, for although the thing was almost half as big

as he was, it weighed only a few ounces despite its mass - and shoved it away from him at the mouth of

the shaft. It was a fair throw and the boulder sailed gently almost into the centre of the opening.

Then, with slow, absurd solemnity, it bounced - off nothing at all - and went sailing away towards the

horizon. It was quite possible that Jack's shove had pushed it past Phobos's velocity of escape, in which

case it would never come down - at least, not down on Phobos, though it might well strike Mars in a

year or so.

'Oh,' Jack said, a little dazed. 'Then that hole's an airlock, after all. How do we get in?'

'We walk in,' Dr Langer said. 'Nobody knows exactly how they did it, but the field there is set to admit

life-forms above a certain level of neural organization, even if they're enclosed in space suits or other

non-living cans. I remember the films of the attempt to drop a Peking duck down that hole. It was in a

spherical capsule, mostly transparent, so you could see it quacking wildly away even though you couldn't

hear a thing. But the capsule wouldn't go through the field, and when we tried to have a man carry it

down, the man went down, all right, but the duck capsule bobbed right back up again like a cork. On the

other hand, the field passed a cat without any difficulty - except for the trouble we had getting it back.'

He laughed very briefly. 'Well, here we go.'

Taking Jack's arm, Dr Langer led the rather reluctant cadet out on to the invisible lens that guarded the

airlock. Jack did not know exactly what he had expected - perhaps a completely smooth surface, like

oiled glass or a field of ice -but in fact the lens, whatever it was, seemed to afford quite a good grip for

his boots. As they approached the centre of the pit, however, the going began to become steadily more

tacky, as though he were walking in a puddle of increasingly thickening syrup. And at the very centre,

Jack found it im-possible to move his feet in any direction more than a few inches before the field seized

them again and returned them to immobility.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

At the same time, Jack noticed uneasily that the rim of the black orifice was slowly rising around them.

It was a distinctly uncomfortable sensation, all too suggestive of being swallowed. Soon Dr Langer and

Jack were sinking into the shaft faster and faster, much faster than could be accounted for by Phobos's

feeble gravity, and the opening on the surface was only a dwindling orange disc, stippled with blue mould,

far above their heads.

'How fast are we going?' Jack said.

'Only about ten feet per second as best I can judge. But bear in mind that I've never been here before,

either. I have to judge by Mars light, just as you do.'

Since there was no other source of light and the walls of the shaft continued to be absolutely smooth, it

shortly became impossible to judge just how fast they were falling, or rather, how fast they were being

drawn down.

'It makes me feel like Alice, falling down the White Rabbit's hole,' Langer's voice said inside the

darkness of Jack's helmet. 'I keep wanting to look at my watch.'

This incongruous comparison, obviously intended to keep Jack's spirits up, actually did amuse him for a

moment. But only a second later, he remembered that at the bottom of that hole inAlice in Wonderland,

she had shed an ocean of tears.

Then a growing sensation of weight, again far beyond anything that could be accounted for by the gravity

of Phobos, told him that they were decelerating. Almost at the same time, a dim glow began to suffuse

upwards through the shaft. It was white light with a distinct greenish tinge to it, quite unlike the reflected

desert sunlight of Mars, and yet quite unlike the artificial light that Jack was familiar with, to. The brighter

it grew, the more unpleasant he found it.

He noticed also, with considerable surprise, that there was now a whisper of friction outside his suit. He

glanced at the exterior pressure gauge inside his helmet. Sure enough - the pressure outside was already

more than nine pounds per square inch and was still rising.

'Can we breathe down here, sir?'

'No, sir,' Langer said promptly. 'The atmosphere down here is more than ninety-nine per cent pure

xenon. The rest of it is nitrogen, most of it in the free-radical state. It's an open question whether you

would die faster of suffocation or of poisoning if you were to take a breath of it. We don't even dare

work in here with respirators; the free radicals would attack the skin and even the fabric. Hello! Here we

are.'

The soles of Jack's boots struck the bottom of the shaft with a barely perceptible jar. Dr Langer did not

hesitate; he stepped out immediately into the subdued greenish-white light, beckoning Jack to follow.

The world into which the shaft opened was so strange as to be almost completely unintelligible. For one

thing, it had no floor. From the exit platform of the shaft, which was merely a brief spur of rock, the walls

curved gently again on all sides to invisibility. It was a gigantic cavern, apparently encompassing the

whole interior of the moon.

Though it was illuminated, there was no way to tell where the light came from, and the light itself behaved

in curious ways. Here and there, it gathered in glowing patches, like clouds of fog, and glowing streamers

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

of it crossed the bands of darkness which lay between one patch and another. At the centre of each

patch, hanging immobile in mid-space, was a shining geometrical solid; there a cube, there a trapezoid,

there a polyhedral shape whose name Jack couldn't remember, there another whose name he had never

known; their sizes were impossible to judge, because in this con-fusing chiaroscuro he could not tell how

far away they were from him or from each other. All of them, however, were stitched together by a

complex web work of rigid, brilliant lines of light - some ruby-red, some sapphire, some topaz - which

were even more difficult to understand, be-cause, although they could be plainly seen to be brighter than

the drifting noctilucent clouds, they did not seem to contribute anything to the more general illumination.

Some of them could also be seen to be pulsating rapidly, almost at the eye's limit of detection, but most

of them looked quite steady.

'Don't let it buffalo you, Jack,' Dr Langer's radio voice said softly in his ears. 'Granted that it looks like

nothing so much as an abstract painting, but actually it's not difficult to understand. Our technology ought

to be up to duplicating it in about a century or perhaps even sooner. Though I can't say that the thought

cheers me much.'

'I'm not exactly buffaloed,' Jack said, not entirely truth-fully, 'but I am puzzled. What does it all mean?'

'Well, let's start with the light. The visible part of it is the least important, but the reason why even that is

so un-pleasant to the eyes is because it's heavily ionizing, the idea being to keep the nitrogen fraction of

the gas here in a con-stant state of electrical conductivity.'

It was strange to hear Dr Langer talking so calmly, indeed so academically, on the flickering verge of

mystery. But there was no doubt that it helped. The troubleshooter spoke again.

'There are no wires or cables anywhere inside Phobos. All the power is passed along by laser beams,

those very tight lines of light you see crisscrossing the clouds of ionized gas. On a smaller scale, there's no

wiring in the various indi-vidual components, either. Each component is a single crys-tal, chemically

almost completely pure, with a circuit laid out inside it partly by a pattern of trace impurities, and partly

by screw dislocations and other mechanical flaws in its molecular structure. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?'

'Sure - transistor circuitry. Dr Langer, I never did under-stand solid-state physics, but haven't we been

doing that kind of thing since about 1975? You don't make the Heart Stars sound anything like a century

ahead of us. They only sound like they're two or three years ahead of me, and that doesn't take much

doing - not on this subject.'

'I guess them a century ahead of us because of the scale on which they've done it, Jack. Each one of

those large blobs of metal that you see floating out there is a single crystal; the shapes tell you what kind

of metal it is. Each one is atomi-cally pure, except for the tiny impurities and dislocations which make it

work. Compared to them, our transistor crys-tals are just seeds, while those there are the full-grown

adults, and we can't grow them yet. As far as I know, we wouldn't even know how to begin.'

The huge, cubist spectacle began to make a little more sense. Nevertheless, it seemed to Jack that there

was nothing that a human being could do with it but look at it, exactly as though it really were a painting.

After all, they were still stuck on this spur of rock.

'All the same, I don't see how anybody ever figured out what any part of this actually does. Where do

we go from here, Dr Langer?'

'We have to get to the centre. There's a control room there. Luckily, it's simple to do, though quite a few

lives were lost figuring it out. Follow me, Jack, follow me very exactly.'

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

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：

ForewordYouhaveprobablyoftenhadtheexperienceofencountering,apparentlyforthefirsttime,anewword-andthenrunningintoitthreeorfourmoretimeswithinjustthenextfewdays.Earlyinthisbook,forinstance,youmaymakeyourfirstencounterwiththeword'processing';itmeans-movementoftheaxisofrotation.It'saverycommonwordinast...

展开>> 收起<<

James Blish - Mission To The Heart Stars.pdf

共62页,预览13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！

James Blish - Mission To The Heart Stars

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: