Peter F. Hamilton - Pandora's Star

VIP免费
2024-12-05 0 0 1.82MB 826 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Pandora's Star
PROLOGUE
Mars dominated space outside theUlysses , a bloated dirty-ginger crescent of a planet that never quite
made it as a world. Small, frigid, barren, airless, it was simply the solar system’s colder version of hell.
Yet its glowing presence in the sky had dominated most of human history; first as a god to inspire
generations of warriors, then as a goal to countless dreamers.
Now, for NASA Captain-Pilot Wilson Kime, it had become solid land. Two hundred kilometers beyond
the landing craft’s narrow, curving windshield he could pick out the dark gash that was the Valles
Marineris. As a boy he’d accessed the technofantasies of the Aries Underground group, entranced by
how one day in an unspecified future, foaming water would once again race down that vast gully as raw
human ingenuity unlocked the frozen ice trapped beneath the rusting landscape. Today, he would be the
first to walk through those dusty craters he’d studied in a thousand satellite photos, trickle the legendary
thin red sand through his gloved fingers. Today was glorious history in the making.
Wilson automatically started a deep feedback breathing exercise, calming his heart before the reality of
what was about to happen could affect his metabolism. No way was he giving those goddamn desk
medics back in Houston a chance to questionhis fitness to pilot the landing craft. Eight years he’d spent
in the USAF, including two combat duties based in Japan for Operation Deliver Peace, followed by
another nine years with NASA. All that buildup and anticipation: the sacrifices, his first wife and totally
alienated kid; the eternal VR training at Houston, the press conferences, the mind-rotting PR tours of
factories; he’d endured it all because it led to this one moment in this most sacred place.
Mars. At last!
“Initiating VKT ranging, cross match RL acquisition data,” he told the landing craft’s autopilot. The
colored lines of the windshield’s holographic display began to change their geometrical patterns. He
kept one eye on the timer: eight minutes. “Purging BGA system and vehicle interlink tunnel.” His left
hand flicked the switches on the console, and tiny LEDs came on to confirm the switch cycle. Some
actions NASA would never entrust to voice activation software. “Commencing BGA nonpropulsive
vent. Awaiting prime ship sep sequence confirmation.”
“Roger that,Eagle II ,” Nancy Kressmire’s voice said in his headset. “Telemetry analysis has you as
fully functional. Prime ship power systems ready for disengagement.”
“Acknowledged,” he told theUlysses ’s captain. Turquoise and emerald spiderwebs within the
windshield fluttered elegantly, reporting the lander’s internal power status. Their sharp primary colors
appeared somehow alien across the dull pallor of the wintry Martian landscape outside. “Switching to
full internal power cells. I have seven greens for umbilical sep. Retracting inter-vehicle access tunnel.”
file:///K|/rah/Hamilton,%20Peter%20F%20-%20Pandora'S%20Star/Hami_0345472195_oeb_c00_r1.html (1 of 7)14-7-2004 0:34:07
Pandora's Star
Alarmingly loud metallic clunks rang through the little cabin as the spaceplane’s airlock tunnel sank
back into the fuselage. Even Wilson flinched at the intrusive sounds, and he knew the spaceplane’s
mechanical layout better than its designers.
“Sir?” he asked. According to the NASA manual, once the lander’s airlock had retracted from the prime
ship they were technically a fully independent vehicle; and Wilson wasn’t the ranking officer.
“TheEagle II is yours, Captain,” Commander Dylan Lewis said. “Take us down when you’re ready.”
Very conscious of the camera at the back of the cabin, Wilson said, “Thank you, sir. We are on-line for
completed undocking in seven minutes.” He could sense the buzz in the five passengers riding behind
him. All of them were the straightest of straight arrows; they had so much right stuff between them it
could be bottled. Yet now the actual moment was here they were no more controlled than a bunch of
school kids heading for their first beach party.
The autopilot ran through the remaining preflight prep sequence, with Wilson ordering and controlling
the list; adhering faithfully to the man-in-the-loop tradition that dated all the way back to the Mercury
Seven and their epic struggle for astronauts to be more than just spam in a can. Right on the seven-
minute mark, the locking pins withdrew. He fired the RCS thrusters, pushingEagle II gently away from
theUlysses . This time there was nothing he could do to stop his heart racing.
As they drew away,Ulysses became fully visible through the windshield. Wilson grinned happily at the
sight of it. The interplanetary craft was the first of its kind: an ungainly collection of cylindrical
modules, tanks, and girders arranged in a circular grid shape two hundred meters across. Its perimeter
sprouted long jet-black solar power panels like plastic petals, all of them tracking the sun. Several of the
crew habitation sections were painted in the stars and stripes, implausibly gaudy against the plain silver-
white thermal foam that coated every centimeter of the superstructure. Right in the center of the vehicle,
surrounded by a wide corrugated fan of silver thermal radiator panels, was the hexagonal chamber that
housed the fusion generator that had made the ten-week flight time possible, constantly supplying power
to the plasma rockets. It was the smallest fusion system ever built: a genuine made-in-America, cutting-
edge chunk of technology. Europe was still building its first pair of commercial fusion reactors on the
ground, while the USA had already commissioned five such units, with another fifteen being built. And
the Europeans certainly hadn’t got anything equivalent to the sophisticatedUlysses generator.
Damnit, we can still get some things right,Wilson thought proudly as the shining conglomeration of
space hardware diminished into the eternal night. It would be another decade until the FESA could
mount a Mars mission, by which time NASA planned on having a self-sustaining base on the icy sands
of Arabia Terra. Hopefully, by then, the agency would also be flying asteroid-capture missions and even
a Jovian expedition as well.I’m not too old to be a part of those, they’ll need experienced commanders.
His mind underwent just the tiniest tweak of envy at the prospect of what would come in the midterm
file:///K|/rah/Hamilton,%20Peter%20F%20-%20Pandora'S%20Star/Hami_0345472195_oeb_c00_r1.html (2 of 7)14-7-2004 0:34:07
Pandora's Star
future, events and miracles whose timetable and budget allocations meant they might just elude him.The
Europeans can afford to wait, though. While thanks to the dominant influence of the Religious Right
over the last few administrations, the U.S. had halted all genetic work centered around stem cells, the
Federal government in Brussels had poured money into biogenic research, with spectacular results. Now
that the early bugs had been ironed out of the hugely expensive procedure, they’d begun to rejuvenate
people. The first man to receive the treatment, Jeff Baker, had died in a climax of global publicity; but in
the following seven years there had been eighteen successes.
Space and Life. Those separate interests spoke volumes about the way the cultures of Earth’s two major
Western power groups had diverged over the past three decades.
Now Wilson’s fellow Americans were beginning to reevaluate their attitude to genetic engineering.
Already there were urban myths of Caribbean and Asian clinics offering the rejuvenation service to
multibillionaires. And Federal Europe was once again attempting to narrow the American lead in space,
desperate to prove to the world that it excelled in every field. Given the fractious political state currently
afflicting the planet, Wilson rather welcomed the idea of the two blocs drawing closer together once
more—that was, after Americans had landed on Mars.
“First de-orbit burn in three minutes,” theEagle II ’s autopilot said.
“Standing by,” Wilson told it. He automatically checked the fuel tank pressures, and followed that up
with main engine ignition procedures.
Three hypergolic fuel rockets at the back of the little spaceplane fired for a hundred seconds, pushing
their orbit into an atmosphere-intercept trajectory. The subsequent airbrake maneuver lasted for over
ninety minutes, with the scant Martian atmosphere pushing against the craft’s swept delta wings, killing
its velocity. For the final fifteen minutes, Wilson could see the faintest of pink glows coming from
theEagle II ’s blunt nose. It was the only evidence of the violence being done to the fuselage by high-
velocity gas molecule impacts. The ride was incredibly smooth, with gravity slowly building as they
sank toward the crater-rumpled landscape of Arabia Terra.
At six kilometers altitude, Wilson activated their profile dynamic wings. They began to expand,
spreading out wide to generate as much lift as possible from the thin, frigid air. At full stretch they
measured a hundred meters from tip to tip, enough to allowEagle II to glide if necessary. Then their
turbine fired up, gently thrusting them forward, keeping speed constant at two hundred fifty kilometers
an hour. The westernmost edge of the massive Schiaparelli Crater slid into sight away in the distance,
rolling walls rising up out of the rumpled ground like a weatherworn mountain range.
“Visual acquisition of landing site,” Wilson reported. His systems schematics were tracing green and
blue sine waves across the view. Ground radar began to overlay a three-dimensional grid of spikes and
gullies that almost matched what he could see.
file:///K|/rah/Hamilton,%20Peter%20F%20-%20Pandora'S%20Star/Hami_0345472195_oeb_c00_r1.html (3 of 7)14-7-2004 0:34:07
Pandora's Star
“Eagle II,midpoint systems review confirms you are go for landing,” said Mission Control. “Good luck,
guys. You’ve got quite an audience back here.”
“Thank you, Mission Control,” Commander Lewis said formally. “We are eager for the touchdown.
Hoping Wilson can give us a smooth one.” It would be another four minutes before anyone back on
Earth heard his words. By then they should be down.
“Contact with cargo landers beacon,” Wilson reported. “Range thirty-eight kilometers.” He squinted
through the windshield as the autopilot printed up a red line-of-sight bracket within the glass. The crater
rim grew steadily larger. “Ah, I’ve got them.” Two dusty gray specks sitting on a broad patch of flat
landscape.
For the last stage,Eagle II flew a slow circle around the pair of robot cargo landers. They were simple
squat cones that theUlysses had sent down two days earlier, loaded with tons of equipment, including a
small prefab ground base. Getting them unloaded and the projected exploration campus up and running
was the principal task awaiting the crew of theEagle II .
“Groundscan confirms area one viability,” Wilson said. He was almost disappointed at the radar picture.
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were landing on the moon, they had to hurriedly take manual
control of their Lunar Module and fly it to safety when the designated landing site turned out to be
strewn with boulders. This time, eighty-one years later, satellite imagery and orbital radar mapping had
eliminated such uncertainty from the flight profile.
He brought theEagle II around on its preplotted approach path, engaging the autopilot. “Landing gear
extended and locked. VM engines pressurized and ready. Profile dynamic wings in reshape mode.
Ground speed approaching one hundred kilometers per hour. Descent rate nominal. We’re on the wire,
people.”
“Good work, Wilson,” Commander Lewis said. “Let’s bump struts, here, huh?”
“You got it, sir.”
The landing rockets fired, andEagle II began to sink smoothly out of the light pink sky. A hundred
meters up, and Wilson couldn’t stand it. His fingers flicked four switches, taking the autopilot off-line.
Red LEDs glared accusingly at him from the console. He ignored them, bringing the little spaceplane
down manually. Easier than any simulation. Dust swirled outside the windshield, thick and cloying as
the rocket jets scoured the surface of Mars. Radar gave him the final approach vectors, there was nothing
to see visually. They settled without a wobble. The sound of the rockets died away. External light began
to brighten as the agitated dust flurries dissipated.
“Houston, theEagle II has landed,” Wilson said. The words had to be forced out, his throat was so tensed
up with pride and exhilaration. He could hear that beautiful phrase echo along history, past and future.
file:///K|/rah/Hamilton,%20Peter%20F%20-%20Pandora'S%20Star/Hami_0345472195_oeb_c00_r1.html (4 of 7)14-7-2004 0:34:07
Pandora's Star
And I made it happen, not some goddamn machine.
A wave of jubilant shouts and cheering broke out in the cabin behind him. He wiped an errant drop of
moisture from his eye with the back of one hand. Then he was suddenly involved with systems
supervision, reengaging the autopilot. External instrumentation confirmed they were down and stable.
The spaceplane had to be put into surface standby mode, supplying power and environmental services to
the cabin, keeping the rocket engines warm so that takeoff wouldn’t be a problem, monitoring the fuel
tank status. A long, boring list of procedures that he worked through with flawless diligence.
Only then did the six of them begin to suit up. Given the cabin’s chronic lack of space, it was a cramped,
difficult process, with everyone jostling each other. When Wilson was almost ready, Dylan Lewis
handed him his helmet.
“Thanks.”
The Commander didn’t say anything, just gave Wilson a look. As reprimands went, it didn’t get much
worse than that.
To hell with you,Wilson retorted silently.We’re the important thing, people coming to Mars is what
matters, not the machines we come in. I couldn’t allow a software program to land us.
Wilson stood in line as the Commander went into the small airlock at the back of the cabin.Third, I get
to be third. Back on Earth they’d only ever remember that Dylan Lewis was first. Wilson didn’t care.
Third.
The tiny display grid inside Wilson’s helmet relayed an image from the external camera set just above
the airlock door. It showed a slim aluminum ladder stretching down to the Martian sand. Commander
Lewis backed out of the open airlock, his foot moving slowly and carefully onto the top rung. Wilson
wanted to shout:For God’s sake get a move on! The suit’s medical telemetry told him his skin was
flushed and perspiring. He tried to do his deep feedback breathing exercise thing, but it didn’t seem to
work.
Commander Lewis was taking the ladder rungs one at a time. Wilson and the others in the cabin held
their breaths; he could feel a couple of billion people doing the same thing back on the old home planet.
“I take this step for all of humanity, so that we may walk together as one people along the road to the
stars.”
Wilson winced at the words. Lewis sounded incredibly sincere. Then someone sniggered, actually
sniggered out loud; he could hear it quite plainly over the general communications band. Mission
Control would go ballistic over that.
file:///K|/rah/Hamilton,%20Peter%20F%20-%20Pandora'S%20Star/Hami_0345472195_oeb_c00_r1.html (5 of 7)14-7-2004 0:34:07
Pandora's Star
Then he forgot it all as Lewis took his step onto the surface, his foot sinking slightly into the red sand of
Mars to make a firm imprint.
“We did it,” Wilson whispered to himself. “We did it, we’re here.” Another outbreak of cheering went
around the cabin. Congratulatory calls flooded down fromUlysses . Jane Orchiston was already
clambering into the airlock. Wilson didn’t even begrudge her that; political correctness wouldn’t allow it
any other way. And NASA was ever mindful of pleasing as many people as possible.
Commander Lewis was busy taking a high-resolution photo of his historic footprint. A requirement that
had been in the NASA manual for the last eighty-one years, ever sinceApollo 11 got back home to find
that embarrasing omission.
Lieutenant Commander Orchiston was going down the ladder—a lot faster than Commander Lewis.
Wilson stepped into the airlock. He couldn’t even remember the time the little chamber took to cycle; it
never existed in his personal awareness. Then it was him backing out onto the ladder. Him checking his
feet were secure on the rungs before placing all his—reduced—weight on them. Him hanging poised on
the bottom rung. “I wish you could see this, Dad.” He put his foot down, and he was standing on Mars.
Wilson moved away from the ladder, cautious in the low gravity. Heart pounding away in his ears.
Breathing loud in the helmet. Hiss of helmet air fans ever-present. Ghostly suit graphic symbols
flickered annoyingly across his full field of vision. Other people talked directly into his ears. He stopped
and turned full circle. Mars! Dirty rocks littering the ground. Sharp horizon. Small glaring sun. He
searched around until he found the star that was Earth. Brought up a hand and waved solemnly at it.
“Want to give me a hand with this?” Commander Lewis asked. He was holding the flagpole, stars and
stripes still furled tightly around the top.
“Yes, sir.”
Jeff Silverman, the geophysicist, was already on the ladder. Wilson walked over to help the Commander
with the flagpole. He gave theEagle II a critical assessment glance on his way. There were some scorch
marks along the fuselage, trailing away from the wing roots, very faint, though. Other than that: nothing.
It was in good shape.
The Commander was attempting to open out the little tripod on the base of the flagpole. His heavy
gloved hands making the operation difficult. Wilson put out his own hand to steady the pole.
“Yo, dudes, how’s it hanging? You need any help there?” The question was followed by a snigger, the
same one he’d heard earlier.
Wilson knew the voice of everybody on the mission. Spend that long together with thirty-eight people in
such a confined space as theUlysses and vocal recognition became perfect. Whoever spoke wasn’t on the
file:///K|/rah/Hamilton,%20Peter%20F%20-%20Pandora'S%20Star/Hami_0345472195_oeb_c00_r1.html (6 of 7)14-7-2004 0:34:07
Pandora's Star
crew. Yet somehow he knew it was real-time, not some pirate hack from Earth.
Commander Lewis had frozen, the flagpole tripod still not fully deployed. “Who said that?”
“That’d be me, my man. Nigel Sheldon, at your service. Specially if you need to get home in like a
hurry.” That snigger again. Then someone else saying: “Oh, man, don’t do that, you’re going to so piss
them off.”
“Who is this?” Lewis demanded.
Wilson was already moving, glide walking as fast as was safe in the low gravity, making for the rear of
theEagle II . He knew they were close, and he could see everything on this side of the spaceplane. As
soon as he was past the bell-shaped rocket nozzles he forced himself to a halt. Someone else was
standing there, arm held high in an almost apologetic wave. Someone in what looked like a homemade
space suit. Which was an insane interpretation, but it was definitely a pressure garment of some type,
possibly modified from deep-sea gear. The outer fabric was made up from flat ridges of dull brown
rubber, in pronounced contrast to Wilson’s snow-white ten-million-dollar Martian Environment
Excursion suit. The helmet was the nineteen fifties classic goldfish bowl, a clear glass bubble showing
the head of a young man with a scraggly beard and long oily blond hair tied back into a pigtail.No
radiation protection, Wilson thought inanely. There was no backpack either, no portable life-support
module. Instead, a bundle of pressure hoses snaked away from the youth’s waist to a . . .
“Son of a bitch,” Wilson grunted.
Behind the interloper was a two-meter circle of another place. It hung above the Martian soil like some
bizarre superimposed TV image, with a weird rim made up from seething diffraction patterns of light
from a gray universe. An opening through space, a gateway into what looked like a rundown physics
lab. The other side had been sealed off with thick glass. A college geek type with a wild Afro hairstyle
was pressed against it, looking out at Mars, laughing and pointing at Wilson. Above him, bright
Californian sunlight shone in through the physics lab’s open windows.
file:///K|/rah/Hamilton,%20Peter%20F%20-%20Pandora'S%20Star/Hami_0345472195_oeb_c00_r1.html (7 of 7)14-7-2004 0:34:07
Pandora's Star
ONE
The star vanished from the center of the telescope’s image in less time than a single human heartbeat.
There was no mistake, Dudley Bose was looking right at it when it happened. He blinked in surprise,
drawing back from the eyepiece. “That’s not right,” he muttered.
He shivered slightly in reaction to the cold air around him, slapping gloved hands against his arms. His
wife, Wendy, had insisted he wrap up well against the night, and he’d dutifully left the house in a thick
woolen coat and sturdy hiking trousers. As always when the sun fell below Gralmond’s horizon, any
warmth in the planet’s thinner-than-average atmosphere dissipated almost immediately. With the
telescope housing open to the elements at two o’clock in the morning, the temperature had dropped
enough to turn his every breath into a stream of gray mist.
Dudley shook the fatigue from his head, and leaned back into the eyepiece. The starfield pattern was the
same—there had been no slippage in the telescope’s alignment—but Dyson Alpha was still missing. “It
couldn’t be that fast,” he said.
He’d been observing the Dyson Pair for fourteen months now, searching for the first clues of the
envelopment that would so dramatically alter the emission spectrum. Until tonight there had been no
change to the tiny yellow speck of light twelve hundred forty light-years away from Gralmond that was
Dyson Alpha.
He’d known there would be a change; it was the astronomy department at Oxford University back on
Earth that had first noticed the anomoly during a routine sky scan back in 2170, two hundred and ten
years ago. Since the previous scan twenty years earlier, two stars, a K-type and an M-type three years
apart, had changed their emission spectrum completely to nonvisible infrared. For a few brief months the
discovery had caused some excited debate among the remnants of the astronomy fraternity about how
they could decay into red giants so quickly, and the extraordinary coincidence of two stellar neighbors
doing so simultaneously. Then a newly settled planet fifty light-years farther out from Earth reported
that the pair were still visible in their original spectrum. Working back across the distance, checking the
spectrum at various distances from Earth, allowed astronomers to work out that the change to both stars
had occurred over a period of approximately seven or eight years.
Given that amount of time, the nature of the change ceased to become a question of astronomy; stars of
that category took a great deal longer to transform into red giants. Their emission hadn’t changed due to
any natural stellar process; it was the direct result of technological intervention on the grandest possible
scale.
Somebody had built a solid shell around each star. It was a feat whose scale was rivaled only by its time
file:///K|/rah/Hamilton,%20Peter%20F%20-%20Pandora'S%20Star/Hami_0345472195_oeb_c01_r1.html (1 of 16)14-7-2004 0:34:46
Pandora's Star
frame. Eight years was astonishingly swift to fabricate such a gigantic structure, and this advanced
civilization had apparently built two at the same time. Even so, the concept wasn’t entirely new to the
human race.
In the twenty-first century, a physicist named Freeman Dyson had postulated that the artifacts of a
technologically advanced civilization would ultimately surround their star in order to utilize all of its
energy. Now someone had turned his ancient hypothesis into reality. It was inevitable that the two stars
would be formally christened the Dyson Pair.
Speculative papers were written after the Oxford announcement, and theoretical studies performed into
how to dismantle Jovian-size planets to produce such a shell. But there was no real urgency connected to
the discovery. The human race had already encountered several sentient alien species, all of them
reassuringly harmless; and the Intersolar Commonwealth was expanding steadily. It would be a matter
of only a few centuries until a wormhole was opened to the Dyson Pair. Any lingering questions about
their construction could be answered then by the aliens themselves.
Now he’d seen that the envelopment was instantaneous, Dudley was left with a whole new set of very
uncomfortable questions about the composition of the shell structure. An eight-year construction period
for any solid shell that size had been assessed as remarkable, but obviously achievable. When he’d
begun the observation he’d expected to note a year-by-year eclipse of the star’s light as more and more
segments were produced and locked into place. This changed everything. To appear so abruptly, the
shell couldn’t be solid. It had to be some kind of force field.Why would anyone surround a star with a
force field?
“Are we recording?” he asked his e-butler.
“We are not,” the e-butler replied. “No electronic sensors are currently active at the telescope focus.”
The voice was slightly thin, treble-boosted; a tone that had been getting worse over the last few years.
Dudley suspected the OCtattoo on his ear was starting to degenerate; organic circuitry was always
susceptible to antibody attack, and his was over twenty-five years old. Not that the glittery scarlet and
turquoise spiral on his skin had changed. A classic spree of youthful dynamism after his last
rejuvenation had made him choose a visible pattern, stylish and chic in those days. Now it was rather
embarrassing for a middle-aged professor to sport around the campus. He should have had the old
pattern erased and replaced it with something more discreet; but somehow he’d never gotten around to
it, despite his wife’s repeated requests.
“Damnit,” Dudley grunted bitterly. But the idea of his e-butler taking the initiative had been a pretty
forlorn hope. Dyson Alpha had risen only forty minutes earlier. Dudley had been setting up the
observation, performing his standard final verification—an essential task, thanks to the poorly
maintained mechanical systems that orientated the telescope. He never ordered the sensor activation
until the checks were complete. That prissy routine might have just cost him the entire observation
project.
file:///K|/rah/Hamilton,%20Peter%20F%20-%20Pandora'S%20Star/Hami_0345472195_oeb_c01_r1.html (2 of 16)14-7-2004 0:34:46
Pandora's Star
Dudley went back for another look. The little star was still stubbornly absent in the visual spectrum.
“Bring the sensors on-line now, will you please. I need to have some sort of record of tonight.”
“Recording now,” his e-butler said. “The sensors could benefit from recalibrating, the entire image is
considerably short of optimum.”
“Yeah, I’ll get on to it,” Dudley replied absently. The state of the sensors was a hardware problem; one
that he ought to assign to his students (all three of them). Along with a hundred other tasks, he thought
wearily.
He pushed back from the telescope, and used his feet to propel the black leather office chair across the
bare concrete floor of the observatory. The rattling noise from its old castors echoed thinly around the
cavernous interior. There was enough vacant space for a host of sophisticated ancillary systems, which
could bring the observatory up to near-professional standards; it could even house a larger telescope. But
the Gralmond university lacked the funds for such an upgrade, and had so far failed to secure any
commercial sponsorship from CST—Compression Space Transport, the only company truly interested
in such matters. The astronomy department survived on a collection of meager government grants, and a
few endowments from pure-science foundations. Even an Earth-based educational charity made an
annual donation.
Beside the door was the long wooden bench that served as a de facto office for the whole department. It
was covered with banks of aging, secondhand electronic equipment and hi-rez display portals. Dudley’s
briefcase was also there, containing his late-night snacks and a flask of tea.
He opened the case and started munching on a chocolate cookie as the sensor images swam up into the
display portals. “Put the infrared on the primary display,” he told the e-butler.
Holographic speckles in the large main portal shoaled into a false color image of the starfield, centered
around the Dyson Pair. Dyson Alpha was now emitting a faint infrared signature. Slightly to one side
and two light-years farther away, Dyson Beta continued to shine normally in its M-type spectrum.
“So that really was the envelopment event,” Dudley mused. It would be two years before anyone could
prove whether the same thing had happened simultaneously at Dyson Beta. At least people would have
to acknowledge that the Dyson Alpha event occurred in under twenty-three hours—the time since his
last recorded observation. It was a start, but a bad one. After all, he’d just witnessed something utterly
astounding. But without a recording to back him up, his report was likely to generate only disbelief, and
a mountainous struggle to maintain his already none-too-high reputation.
Dudley was ninety-two, in his second life, and fast approaching time for another rejuvenation. Despite
his body having the physical age of a standard fifty-year-old, the prospect of a long, degrading campaign
within academia was one he regarded with dread. For a supposedly advanced civilization, the Intersolar
Commonwealth could be appallingly backward at times, not to mention cruel.
file:///K|/rah/Hamilton,%20Peter%20F%20-%20Pandora'S%20Star/Hami_0345472195_oeb_c01_r1.html (3 of 16)14-7-2004 0:34:46
摘要：

Pandora'sStarPROLOGUEMarsdominatedspaceoutsidetheUlysses,abloateddirty-gingercrescentofaplanetthatneverquitemadeitasaworld.Small,frigid,barren,airless,itwassimplytheso\larsystem’scolderversionofhell.Yetitsglowingpresenceintheskyhaddominatedmostofhumanhistory;\firstasagodtoinspiregenerationsofwarrior...

展开>> 收起<<
Peter F. Hamilton - Pandora's Star.pdf

共826页,预览10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！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：826 页 大小：1.82MB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-05

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 826
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注