Anderson, Poul - Starfarers

VIP免费

2024-12-06 0 0 1.36MB 311 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

POUL ANDERSON

STARFARERS

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events

portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

or portions thereof, in any form. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

Tor Books on the World Wide Web: http:IIwww.tor.com Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates,

Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anderson, Poul, date Starfarers I Poul Anderson. — 1st ed.

p. cm. "A Tor book." ISBN 0-312-86037-4 (alk. paper)

I. Title.

PS3551.N378S727 1998 813'.54 — dc21 98-21766

First Edition: November 1998

Printed in the United States of America 0987654321

TO JIM FUNARO WHO HAS LED MANY A CONTRCT MISSION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For information, advice, and much else, I owe thanks to Karen Anderson (as always),

Victor Fernandez-Davila, editor Robert Gleason, the late Kenneth Gray, G. David

Nordley, and Aharon Sheer. Special thanks are due Robert L. Forward and Sidney

Coleman. The idea of a nuclear "time machine" is the former's. An idea of the latter's

suggested the concept behind the zero-zero drive to me; he kindly sent me a copy of his

paper, but it turns out that my speculation is quite unlike his real-science thought and

may even contradict it.

The lines of verse quoted in Chapter III are from

The Book of Songs,

translated by

publisher, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

The lines of verse by Jorge Luis Borges and their English translation by Richard Howett

and Cesar Rennart quoted in Chapter IX are from

Selected Poems 1923-1967

by Jorge

1972 by Emece Editores, S.A., and Norman Thomas di Giovanni, by permission of the

publisher, Bantam Doubleday Dell.

The lines of verse by Rudyard Kipling quoted in Chapter XVII are in the public domain.

Chapter XXI first appeared in a different form as "Ghetto" in

The Magazine of Fantasy

and Science Fiction,

Poul Anderson. The lines from the ballad "Jerry Clawson" quoted in it are copyright by

the author, Gordon R. Dickson, and used by his permission.

Chapter XVII first appeared in a slightly different form as "The Tale of the Cat" in

Analog Science

Fiction and Fact,

person here named is in any way responsible for any mistakes or other flaws in this

book.

ABOARD THE STARSHIP ENVOY

Captain: Ricardo Iriarte Nansen

Aguilar Mate and first pilot: Lajos Ruszek

Second pilot: Jean Kilbirnie

Engineer: YU Wenji

Second engineer: Alvin Brent

Physicist: Hanny Dayan

Planetologist: Timothy Cleland

Biologist and physician: Mamphela Mokoena

Biochemist: Selim ibn Ali Zeyd

Linguist and semantician: Ajit Nathu Sundaram

STARFARERS

"Look yonder." The man pointed northeast and aloft. "That very bright star in the

Milky Way. Do you know it?"

"Yes," answered his son. "Alpha Centauri. The nearest to us. It's two, really, and a

third that is dim."

Don Lucas Nansen Ochoa nodded, pleased. Juan was barely past his seventh

birthday. "Now look up from it, a little to your right. That other brilliant one is Beta

Centauri."

"Is it close, too?"

"No, it's far off. Almost seventy times as far, I have read. But it shines thousands of

times as bright as our sun. Most of those we see are giants. Else our eyes could not find

them across their distances."

Man and boy sat their horses for a while in silence. They had drawn rein after leaving

well behind them the house and its outbuildings, walled off by a cedar grove. The

autumn air rested cool, still, and altogether clear. They had light enough without a

moon, stars crowding heaven, galactic belt gleaming frosty. The Paraguayan plain rolled

away through this dusk toward darkness, grassland broken by stands of trees and big,

stump-shaped anthills. No cattle were in view, but now and then a lowing went

mournfully through the early night.

"Where are

they?"

whispered the boy at last. Awe shivered in his words.

Don Lucas's hand traced an are along the constellation. "Look on upward from Beta,

to your left. Epsilon — do you see it? — and, past it, Zeta. The name Zeta means it's the

sixth brightest in the Centaur. That's where the signs are."

PROLOGUE

"At Zeta?"

"No, as nearly as I can find out from the news, that star just happens to be in our

line of sight to the things. They are actually far beyond it."

"Are they . . . are they coming here?"

"Nobody knows. But none of them are headed straight toward us. And we don't know

what they are, natural or artificial or what. All the astronomers can say is that there are

those fiery points of Xrays moving very fast, very far away. The news programs yammer

about an alien civilization, but really, it's too soon for anybody to tell." Don Lucas

laughed a bit. "Least of all an old

estanciero

like me. I'm sorry, you asked me to explain

what's been on the television, and I cannot say much more than that you must be

patient."

Juan pounced. "Are you?"

"Um-m,

I hope they'll corral the truth while I'm still above ground. But you should

surely live to hear it."

"What

do you

think?"

Don Lucas straightened in the saddle. Juan saw his face shadowed by the wide-

brimmed hat like a pair of wings against the sky. "I may be wrong, of course," he said.

"Yet I dare hope someone is faring from star to star, and someday men will."

Suddenly overwhelmed, cold lightnings aflicker in him, the boy stared past his father,

outward and outward. It was as if he felt the planet whirling beneath him, about to cast

him off into endlessness; and his spirit rejoiced.

He became the grandfather of Ricardo Nansen Aguilar.

With never a sight of beautiful, changeable Earth, Farside gained a night which stars

made into no more than a setting for their brilliance. And the Lunar bulk shielded it from

the radio noise of the mother world; and the stable mass underfoot and the near-

vacuum overhead were likewise ideal for many kinds of science. It was no wonder that

some of the most gifted people alive were gathered here, in spite of monastic quarters

and minimal amenities. Besides, Muramoto thought, those should improve. Already the

desolation of stone and dust was redeemed by an austere elegance of domes,

detectors, dishes, taut and silvery power lines.

As his car neared observatory headquarters, he glanced through its bubbletop and

found the red beacon light that was Mars.

People there too, nowadays.

An old thrill

tingled.

Yes, man does not live by bread alone, nor by economics and politics. It was

the vision of ships flying through heaven that got us back into space in earnest. Damn

it, this time we'll stay, and keep going!

He reached the topside turret, linked airlocks, crossed over, and descended. The

corridor below felt doubly drab by contrast. However, he could move fast along it,

enjoying the long, low-gravity lope. Ordinarily an officer of the United States Aerospace

Force was expected to be more formal.

He had called ahead. The director awaited him in her office. She greeted him a little

warily, offered him a chair, told the outer door to close, and sat down again behind her

desk. For a few minutes they exchanged ritual courtesies — how were things going

here, how were things back home, how had his flight from Earth been and his drive

from Port Apollo?

Then Helen Lewis leaned forward and said, "Well, I'm sure your time is as valuable as

mine, Colonel. Shall we get directly to business? Why have you requested this meeting,

and why did you want it to be confidential?"

He knew she shared the distaste for the military that had been common among

intellectuals at least since the Siberian Action. His best approach was

straightforwardness. "You seemed to prefer it that way, Dr. Lewis. May I be frank?

You've entered a request for a large expansion of your facilities. The wide-orbit

interferometric system, especially, would count as high priced even in free and easy

times, and you know how tight budgets are at present. I'm afraid a wish list of research

projects won't open any purses soon. After all, you're still discovering marvelous things

with the equipment on hand. What do you really want to search for?"

Her gaze challenged his. "Why do you, why does your service, want to know?"

"Because we've gotten hints that this may be something we'd go for, too." Muramoto

lifted his palm. "No, please, not with any idea of warlike application. If our guess is

right, it is an area that concerns us strongly, but 'we' are not just a few men and

women in uniform. We include civilians, scientists, and certain members of the

President's Advisory Council."

She flushed beneath the gray hair. A fist clenched. "My God, does that clique decide

everything these days?"

Muramoto had his own wistfulness about the republic that Jefferson helped found,

but it wasn't relevant today. "Myself, I hope your request will be approved. Yes, and I'd

like it to be an international undertaking, as you've proposed. So would my superiors,

partly to save American money, partly on principle. We aren't blind chauvinists."

Taken aback, she sat quiet for a while before she murmured, "I... presume... not."

"But you haven't given us reasons to fight for what you want," he said. "If you'll tell

me what you have in mind and why it shouldn't be publicized" — he smiled —"you'll

find we military are pretty good at keeping our mouths shut."

Lewis reached a decision. She actually returned his smile. "The truth is nothing

desperate. It's bound to come out in due course, and certainly should. But the potential

for sensationalism —" She drew breath. "You see, our latest observations lie at the limits

of sensitivity available to us at present. They could be in error. An announcement,

followed by a retraction, would do worse than wreck several careers. It would harm this

whole institution."

"I see, I thought so," he replied. Intently: "You think you have found more starship

trails, don't you?"

She nodded. Although he was not surprised, his mind whirled back through time,

twenty-seven years, and again he was a boy, watching the news, listening to the

discussions, feeling the dream explode into reality.

Pointlike sources of hard X-rays with radio tails, crisscrossing a region in the Centaur.

Some have come suddenly into being as we watched, others have blanked out. Parallax

measurements taken across interplanetary spans show they are five thousand light-

years distant. Therefore maximum transverse motion joins with Doppler effect to show

they are traveling at virtually the speed of light.

What can they be but the trails of material objects blasting through the interstellar

medium?

Slowly, grudgingly, more and more physicists admit that the least fantastic hypothesis

is that they indicate spacecraft.

They aren't many, less than a hundred, and they seemed confined to a volume of

perhaps two hundred parsecs' diameter. Why that is, why they don't range everywhere,

why they haven't come to us

—

those are among the mysteries. But all at once, humans

around the whole Earth want us also to be in space.

Through a quickening pulsebeat, he heard Lewis's carefully dry voice: "Lately, here,

using the Maxwell superconducting telescope, we've found what appear to be similar

phenomena elsewhere. The traces are faint, scattered, from sources far more distant

than those behind Zeta Centauri. They are few, and none is as rich in objects as that

region is. But there they are. Or so we think.

"To confirm, we need better instruments. That will also let us pinpoint them in the

galaxy. More important, new theoretical work suggests that improved data will give

clues to what the power source is. There's the great stumbling block, you know. Where

does the energy come from? I honestly believe we're on the verge of a revolution in our

understanding of the universe.

"I can show you around, introduce you to the people doing the research, let you

judge for yourself before you report to your group. Would you like that?"

"I — I would," he answered inadequately. "And — no promises, you realize, but — I

expect you'll get what you want."

It happened that Avery Houghton launched his coup on the day that Edward Olivares

recorded a television interview. Nothing had overtly begun when the physicist reached

his office, but the crisis had been building up for weeks — demands, threats,

demonstrations, riots — and was now unmistakably close to the breaking point. Most

Americans who could've stayed home, huddled over the newscasts. The amber-hued

Hispanic facades of Caltech stood on a nearly deserted campus, impossibly sunlit and

peaceful, while fighter jets drew contrails across the blue above them.

Olivares was stubborn about keeping promises. He arrived at the appointed hour. The

camera crew was already on hand, trying hard not to act nervous. Joanne Fleury

succeeded in it. She had her own professional pride.

"I fear we won't draw much of an audience," Olivares remarked while the crew was

setting up.

"Maybe not for the first showing," Fleury said, "though I imagine a fair number will

tune in around the world regardless of our troubles here. But the rebroadcasts will pull

their billions."

"We could postpone —"

"No, if you please, sir. This is going to be a classic in science journalism. Let's do it

while we've got the chance."

Planning and a sketchy run-through had gone before, and the business went more

smoothly than might have been awaited. But then, it offered a brief escape from what

was outside.

After the cameras had scanned the book-lined room, the battered desk, the portrait

of Einstein, while Fleury gave her introduction, " — scientist, mathematical physicist, as

famous as he is modest — We'll discuss his latest and greatest achievement . . ." they

moved in on her and him, seated in swivel chairs. A projector spread a representation of

the galaxy behind them, ruddy nucleus and outcurving blue-tinged spiral arms,

awesome athwart blackness. Somehow his slight frame belonged in front of it.

She gestured at the grandeur. "Alien spacecraft traveling there, almost at the speed

of light," she said. "Incredible. Perhaps you, Dr. Olivares, can explain to us why it took

so long to convince so many experts that this must be the true explanation."

"Well," he replied, "if the X-ray sources are material objects, the radiation is due to

their passage through the gas in interstellar space. That's an extremely thin gas, a hard

vacuum by our standards here on Earth, but when you move close to

— we call the

velocity of unimpeded light

— then you slam into a lot of atoms every second. This

energizes them, and they give back the energy in the form of hard X-rays."

For a minute, an animated diagram replaced the galaxy. Electrons tore free of atoms,

fell back, spat quanta. The star images returned as Olivares finished: "To produce the

level of radiation that our instruments measure, those masses must be enormous."

"Mostly due to the speed itself, am I right?" Fleury prompted.

Olivares nodded. "Yes. Energy and mass are equivalent. As a body approaches

its

kinetic energy, therefore its mass, increases without limit. Only such particles as

photons, which have no rest mass, can actually travel at that velocity. For any material

object, the energy required to reach c would be infinite. This is one reason why nothing

can move faster than light.

"The objects, the ships, that we're talking about are moving so close to

that their

masses must have increased by a factor of hundreds. Calculating backward, we work

out that their rest masses — the masses they have at ordinary speeds — must amount

to tens of thousands of tonnes. In traditional physics,

this

means that to boost every

such vessel, you would have to annihilate millions of tonnes of matter, and an equal

amount to slow down at journey's end. That's conversion on an astrophysical scale.

Scarcely sounds practical, eh? Besides, it should produce a torrent of neutrinos; but we

have no signs of any."

Fleury picked up her cue. "Also, wouldn't the radiation kill everybody aboard? And if

you hit a speck of dust, wouldn't that be like a nuclear warhead exploding?"

A jet snarled low above the roof. Thunder boomed through the building. Cameras

shivered in men's hands. Fleury tensed. The noise passed, and she found herself

wondering whether or not to edit this moment out of the tapes.

"Go on, please," she urged.

Olivares had glanced at the galaxy, and thence at Einstein. They seemed to calm him.

"Yes," he told the world. "There would have to be some kind of — I'm tempted to say

streamlining. The new spaceborne instruments have shown that this is indeed the case.

Gas and dust are diverted, so that they do not encounter the object itself, but flow

smoothly past it at a considerable distance." An animation represented the currents. The

ship was a bare sketch. Nobody knew what something made by nonhumans might be

like. "This can, in principle, be done by means of what we call magnetohydrodynamics."

Fleury had regained her smile. "A word nearly as knotty as the problem."

"It takes very powerful force fields," Olivares said. "Again we meet the question of

energy. Of course, the requirement is minuscule compared to what's necessary for the

speed."

"And nobody could build a nuclear power plant to supply that."

"No. If you did, you'd find you had built a star."

"Then where does the energy come from?"

"The original suggestion was that it comes from the vacuum."

"Could you explain that? It sounds like, well, Alice's Cheshire cat."

Olivares shrugged. "A good deal of quantum mechanics does. Let me try. Space is

not a passive framework for events to happen in. It is a sea of virtual particles. They

constantly go in and out of existence according to the uncertainty principle. The energy

density implied is tremendous."

"But we don't know how to put the vacuum to work, do we?"

"Only very slightly, as in the Casimir effect. You see, the more energy you 'borrow'

from the vacuum, the shorter the time before it must be 'returned.' Both these

quantities, energy and time, are far too small to power a spacecraft."

"But now you, Dr. Olivares, have shown how it can be done," Fleury said softly.

He shook his head. "Not by myself. I simply pursued some speculations that go back

to the last century. And then the new information started to come in from the new

instruments."

Fleury gestured. The galaxy gave way to the observatory on Lunar Farside. After a

few seconds the scene swept across millions of kilometers to the devices in their huge

orbits. Representations of laser beams quivered between them and back toward the

Moon, bearing data. An antenna pointed at a constellation. Briefly, the outlines of a

centaur stood limned amidst those stars. It vanished, and a telescopic view expanded. It

zoomed past a globular cluster of suns, on toward the one called Zeta, and on and on

beyond. Tiny fireballs twinkled into existence, crawled across the deep, and died back

down into the darkness while fresh ones appeared. "The bow waves of the argosies,"

Fleury intoned.

The animations ended. The galaxy came back.

"Details we could not detect before, such as certain faint spectral lines, are now

lending confirmation to my cosmodynamic model," Olivares said. "And that model, in

turn, suggests the energy source for such spacecraft. That's all," he ended diffidently.

"I'd say that's plenty, sir," the journalist responded. "Could you tell us something

about your ideas?"

"It's rather technical, I fear."

"Let's be brave. Please say whatever you can without equations."

Olivares leaned back and drew breath. "Well, cosmologists have agreed for a long

time that the universe originated as a quantum fluctuation in the seething sea of the

vacuum, a random concentration of energy so great that it expanded explosively. Out of

this condensed the first particles, and from them evolved atoms, stars, planets, and

living creatures."

Excitement throbbed beneath the academic phrases. "At first the cosmologists took

for granted that the beginning involved a fall to the ground state, somewhat like the

transition of an electron in a high orbit to the lowest orbit it can occupy. But what if this

is not the case? What if the fall is only partway? Then a reservoir of potential energy

remains. For an electron, it's a photon's worth. For a universe, it is vast beyond

comprehension.

"I've shown that, if the cosmos is in fact in such a metastable condition, we can

account for what the astronomers have observed, as well as several other things that

were puzzling us. It's possible to tap energy from the unexpended substrate — energy

more than sufficient, for lengths of time counted not in Planck units but in minutes,

even hours."

Fleury whistled. "How can we do this?"

Olivares chuckled. "I'll leave that to the laboratory physicists, and afterward the

engineers. In principle, though, it must be by means of what I'll call a quantum field

gate. We can use a Bose-Einstein condensate to generate a certain laserlike effect and

bring all the atoms in two parallel, superconducting plates into the same quantum state.

The consequences are nonlinear and result in the creation of a singularity. Through this

the energy of the substrate flows. Presumably it will distribute itself evenly through any

connected matter, so that the acceleration is not felt."

"Hoo, you're right, this is kind of technical." A touch of practicality should liven it.

"How does the, um, pilot get the ship headed the way he/she/it wants to go?"

good question," Olivares approved. "I'm glad you know the difference between a

scalar and a vector. I think the velocity vector must increase or decrease linearly. In

other words, when the ship acquires the new energy, she continues in the same

straight-line direction as she was moving in. I'm still working on the problem of angular

momentum."

"More technicalities," Fleury said ruefully. "You mentioned having this energy for a

period of maybe hours. Must it then go back?"

Olivares nodded. "Yes, just as with the familiar vacuum, a loan from the substrate

must be repaid. The product of energy borrowed and time for the loan is a constant.

However, with the substrate the constant is immensely larger — a multiple of the Planck

energy, which is itself enormous. The quantum field collapses, reclaiming the borrowed

energy for the substrate."

"But the ship can take out another loan right away?"

"Evidently. The instruments have, in fact, detected flickerings in the X-ray outputs

that correspond quite nicely to this. From the inverse proportionality of energy and time,

it follows that every jump is of the same length. My preliminary calculations suggest that

this length is on the order of a hundred astronomical units. The exact value depends on

the local metric —" Olivares laughed. "Never mind!"

"Maybe we can talk a little about what a voyage would feel like, aboard a ship like

that," Fleury proposed.

"Why not? It'll take us back to less exotic territory."

"Could you review the basic facts? For some of us, our physics has gotten kind of

rusty."

"It's simple enough," Olivares said, quite sincerely. "When you travel at relativistic

speeds, you experience relativistic effects. I've mentioned the increase of mass. The

shortening of length in the direction of motion is another. Of course, you yourself

wouldn't notice this. To you, the outside universe has shrunken and grown more

massive. And your observations are as valid as anybody else's."

"What about the effect on time? I should think that'd matter most to the crew."

"Ah, yes. Time dilation. Loosely speaking, if you're traveling at close to

for you time

passes more slowly than it does for the friends you left behind you. One of those

spacecraft may take several hundred years to cross the several hundred light-years

between her home port and her destination. To those aboard, whoever or whatever

they are, a few weeks will have passed."

Before she could head him off — but it could be edited out later if need be —

Olivares continued: "The new theory modifies this a bit. If you travel by way of

the

quantum field gate, you never get the full time dilation you would if you accelerated to

the same velocity by ordinary, impossible rocket means. However, at high energies the

difference becomes too small to be worth thinking about. Contrastingly, the less energy

you borrow from the substrate, the worse the ratio is. You could take an extremely long

time by your clocks — theoretically forever — to transit the fixed distance of a jump at

an ordinary speed. You'd do better to use a regular jet motor.

"So the quantum field gate is not for travel between the planets. Nor do I expect it

will serve any other mundane purpose."

"But it will take us to the stars," Fleury breathed.

She guided the conversation from that point, retracing much ground, expanding

explanations, weaving in a few personal, human matters. It would be raw material for a

program that should awaken eagerness in every thinking person who saw it, around

Earth, on the Moon and Mars, faring to the ends of the Solar System.

At last the two stood up. She shook his frail hand and said, "Thank you, thank you,

Dr. Olivares, for this hour," which had actually been almost three, "and thank you

infinitely more for everything you have given the human race."

That

would remain in the

tapes.

Immediacy closed in. Blasphemous though it felt, she could not help herself; she

went to the television set in his office and tuned in a newscast.

Terror leaped from the screen. Houghton's junta had seized the Capitol and White

House. He had declared a state of emergency and martial law. A number of military

units, here and there across the country, had mobilized to resist, and battle had erupted

at several locations. She saw combat in the air above Seattle, street fighting in Houston,

a city block burning in Minneapolis.

She turned and seized Olivares's hand again. Through her own tears she saw his.

"No, God damn it!" she cried. "We've got work to do, you and I!"

— Conflict sputtered out in the next few days, as Houghton prevailed. After all, he

and his cause were widely popular. He was now the permanent Chief Advisor to any and

every President of the United States. The trial and execution of his predecessor assured

the docility of Congress and the courts. His reign lasted until his death, nineteen years

later.

Olivares lived much longer in history.

Once an aspect of nature is known, quantum computers and nanotechnic

construction make for rapid progress. Barely ten years passed between the publication

of his theory and the departure of the first spacecraft for Alpha Centauri.

Surely billions of eyes watched on screens as it left Earth orbit. A few persons on

Himalia were luckier. That little moon of Jupiter chanced to be near when the vessel

passed by. For many hours before and after the moment, work ceased. Almost everyone

crammed into the habitation domes from which it would be directly visible.

Dmitri Sumarokov and Karl Vogel did not leave their station. They and their robots

were prospecting the Stephanos Crater area. It might have been more exciting to watch

with a group, but would certainly have been more uncomfortable. The partners simply

donned spacesuits, took what optical gear they had, and went out of their roundhut.

Low above a topplingly near horizon, the giant planet loomed close to fullness. Larger

in this sky than Luna in Earth's, lion-tawny, banded with clouds and swirled with storms

in subtle hues, a glimmer of rings offside, it flooded most stars out of vision. The

radiance fell soft over ice, rocky upthrusts, scars, and pockmarks. Breath and pulsebeat

sounded loud in the silence.

Trouble with the air recycler had caused a delay. Repairs couldn't wait; dead men

can't watch anything. With scant time to set up, they wasted none in speech, except for

an occasional muttered curse. But when they had their telescope aimed and an image

appeared in the display, Sumarokov whooped, "There! See, Karl, see!"

A point of light swelled rapidly within the frame. It turned into a jumble of glints and

shadows. It became a bright spheroid from which reached structures that seemed as

fragile as spiderwebs. The telescope swung, tracking. Vogel peered along it. Pointing,

he said, his tone not quite steady,

"Selbst das Schiff."

In the English they shared:

"Someday our children will envy us, Dmitri."

The naked eye saw a spark flit above a crag and across the night. It could have been

any satellite, catching the rays of the sunken sun. Two Galilean moons outshone it. But

Sumarokov and Vogel stood enthralled.

It faded, dwindling away into distance. Their gaze went back to the display. Abruptly

the magnified image vanished in a flare. They glimpsed the reality as a wink near the

Jovian disc. "What was that?" Sumarokov exclaimed.

"The jet fired," Vogel answered. He had studied the subject more closely than the

other man. "Approach maneuver."

"So soon?"

"You would not want to operate a plasma jet in Jupiter's radiation belt."

"No. . . . No, certainly not." Again the shape was in telescopic view, coasting along on

gravity and momentum, shrinking, shrinking. "The day will come," Sumarokov said

raptly, "when none of this will be necessary."

"Um, I don't know," Vogel replied. "They, those robots, they do have to be well away

from the sun before they turn on the zero-zero drive. Something about space not being

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：

POULANDERSONSTARFARERSATOMDOHERTYASSOCIATESBOOKNEWYORKThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisnovelareeitherfictitiousorareusedfictitiously.STARFARERSCopyright©1998byTheTrigonierTrustAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbook,orportionsthereof,inanyform.Thisbookispri...

展开>> 收起<<

Anderson, Poul - Starfarers.pdf

共311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！

Anderson, Poul - Starfarers

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: