Haldeman, Joe - Mindbridge

VIP免费
2024-12-15 0 0 230.57KB 77 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt
MINDBRIDGE
Joe Haldeman
WHAT MUST HUMANITY LEARN ABOUT ITSELF TO SURVIVE?
"Haldeman creates real, human characters.
They are three-dimensional in pain, fear, and love."
Cincinnati Enquirer
"DAZZLING
... soars into speculation on the future of humanity.
I couldn't put it down!"
Cleveland Plain Dealer
"FASTER-THAN-LIGHT
. . . . Haldeman knows exactly what he is doing."
The New York Times
"MASTERFUL"
Houston Chronicle
"SPELLBINDING"
Science Fiction Review
SELECTED BY THE SCIENCE FICTION BOOK CLUB
This book is for my teachers at the Iowa Writers' Workshop:
Stephen Becker
Vance Bourjaily
Ray Carver
John Cheever
Stanley Elkin
William Price Fox
John Leggett
Also for
John Brunner
Dos Passos, pro forma
The quotation from the I Ching in Chapter Two is taken from the James Legge translation, copyright
(c) 1973 by Causeway Books.
AVON BOOKS
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt (1 of 77) [1/15/03 7:23:04 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt
A division of
The Hearst Corporation
959 Eighth Avenue
New York, New York 10019
Copyright (c) 1976 by Joe Haldeman
Published by arrangement with St. Martin's Press, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-26185
ISBN: 0-380-01689-3
All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any
form whatsoever. For information address St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New
York 10010
First Avon Printing, February, 1978
AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN
OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA,
HECHO EN U.S.A.
Printed In Canada
Contents
1. Blessed Are the Peacemakers 9
2. Autobiography 2062 11
3. Personnel Report 17
4. Roster 18
5. Chapter One 20
6. Biospheres: Classroom 2041 25
7. Chapter Two 31
8. Geoformy I 33
9. The Levant-Meyer Translation 36
10. Chapter Three 39
11. Bridge I 44
12. Chapter Four 46
13. Insurance Manual 50
14. The Slingshot Effect 51
15. Chapter Five 53
16. Autopsy 57
17. Schedule 59
18. Chapter Six: Prelude 61
19. Fugue 66
20. Coda 74
21. To the Marriage of True Minds
Admit Impediments 75
22. Sing Nonnie 77
23. Chapter Seven 79
24. Geoformy II: Access to Tools 86
25. Carry the Seed 91
26. Autobiography 2051 94
27. Touch Me Not 100
28. Chapter Eight 103
29. They Also Serve 109
30. Nine Lives 114
31. Crystal Ball I 117
32. Help Wanted 120
33. Chapter Nine 121
34. Numbers and Dollars 131
35. Autobiography 2053 136
36. Things That Go Bump in the Night 138
37. Chapter Ten 142
38. Second Contact 148
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt (2 of 77) [1/15/03 7:23:04 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt
39. Chapter Eleven 153
40. Autobiography 2053 (continued) 157
41. All I Know Is What I Read in the Papers 159
42. Chapter Twelve 163
43. Job Description 172
44. Chapter Thirteen 175
45. Messenger 182
46. Autobiography 2034 184
47. Chapter Fourteen 185
48. Psychiatrist's Report 187
49. Chapter Fifteen 189
50. Mindbridge 199
51. Crystal Ball II 203
52. Autobiography 2149 205
53. For They Shall Be Called
the Children of God 208
1
Blessed Are the Peacemakers
Denver pissed him off.
Jacque Lefavre had managed a long weekend pass from the Academy, and at the last minute decided to
go to Denver instead of Aspen. It looked like rain.
Indeed it rained in Denver, bucket after cold bucket, time off at midnight for sleet. In Aspen, he
learned later, it had been eight inches of good powder snow.
He went to the Denver Mint and it was closed. So was the museum; government holiday. He went to a
bad movie.
He was walking along with his overcoat open and a cab splashed him from collar to cuff. Traveling
light, he'd brought no other outer clothes.
The hotel's one-hour dry cleaning service took twenty hours. They wouldn't admit they'd lost the
trousers.
He drank too much room-service booze, sitting in his room watching daytime TV in his underwear.
When he got his uniform back, they had neglected to roll the cuffs. He would have to re-iron them
when he got back to Colorado Springs.
The desk clerk would allow him neither student discount nor military discount. He had to shout his
way all the way to the assistant manager, and then they only gave him the reduced rate to get rid
of him.
The train broke down and was six hours late. He stomped his way through the sleeping dormitory, in
mild trouble for coming in after curfew, and smelled fresh paint when the elevator stopped at his
floor.
His roommate had painted their room flat black. Walls, ceiling, even the windows. Jacque had
painted the room at the beginning of the semester, to cover up the government green. Now he
discovered a curious thing.
There was a limit to rage.
"Uh, Clark," he said mildly. "What, you didn't like beige?"
Clark Franklin, his roommate, was stretched out on the bed, chewing a toothpick and studying the
ceiling. "Nope."
"Personally, I thought it was rather soothing." He felt deadly calm but abstractly realized that
his fingernails were hurting his palms. He stood at the foot of Franklin's bed.
Franklin shifted, crossing his ankles. He hadn't looked at Jacque yet. "Chacun à son goot."
"'Goût.' I don't like the black very much."
"Well."
"You should have asked me first. We could have arrived at a compromise. I would've helped you
paint it."
"You weren't here. I had to paint it while I had the time free." He looked at Jacque, lids half
closed. "The beige was distracting, I couldn't study."
"You lazy son of a bitch, I've never seen you crack a book!" A neighbor thumped the wall and
shouted for them to keep it down in there.
Franklin took the toothpick out of his mouth and inspected it. "Well, yeah. Couldn't study in the
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt (3 of 77) [1/15/03 7:23:04 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt
beige."
The next morning the registration clerk told Jacque he would have to wait until next semester to
get a new roommate. Four months.
Actually, Franklin moved out a few weeks early. He left three teeth behind.
2
Autobiography 2062
I've never used a voice typer before but I know the general idea you've got to damn you've got to
press the character button and say period. . . . There. Comma,,,, It works, how about that.
Paragraph button now.
My name is Jacque, spelling light comes on, Jacque Lefavre. If it were a French machine it
probably would have spelled out "Jacques" and the hell with it, but no, that's right the way it is
up there, without the final ess.
This is for the archives, I mean ARCHIVES damn. Got to touch the capitals button then get off it
before you say the word. Starting over.
This is for the Archives of the Agency for Extraterrestrial Development. Motivational analysis and
training evaluation survey. Highly confidential, so get your eyes back where they belong.
Begin at the beginning, my freshman composition teacher used to say, and I could never figure out
whether that was profound or stupid. But all right, the beginning. I was conceived sometime in the
spring of 2024. We'll skip the next eighteen years or so.
But I should say something about my father because that is important. And if what they say is
true, that this won't be read (spelling light again, crazy language) for another twenty years,
then people will probably have forgotten who he was.
My dad's-Robert Lefavre's-shining hour was the paper he delivered at the 2034 American Physical
Society meeting. It was called "The Levant-Meyer Translation: Physics as Wishful Thinking." Look
it up, it's very convincing. It was well-received. But the next month, Meyer sent a mouse and a
camera to Kruger 60 and they came back alive and full of exposed film, respectively. Via the LMT.
So in one day my father was reduced from Nobel candidate to footnote.
Even as young as I was, I could see that something broke in my father when that happened.
Something snapped. With hindsight, now, I have sympathy for him. But he was a ruined man, and I
grew up disillusioned with him, contemptuous and hostile.
It's kind of a kick, watching this machine spell. I couldn't spell contemptuous if my life
depended on it. Now if they could only program it to put the semicolons in where they belong...
So as far as motivational analysis, I guess the main reason I became a Tamer was to hurt my dad.
After his anti-LMT thesis was demonstrated to be wrong, Dad took a sabbatical from the Institut
Fermi and never went back. Maybe they asked him not to return, but I doubt it. I think it was just
that he would have had to start work on applications of the Levant-Meyer Translation, like
everyone else at the Institut. After spending six years trying to prove that there was no such
thing as the LMT; that the freak accident that happened to Dr. Levant had nothing to do with
matter transmission, but could be explained in terms of conventional thermodynamics.
So we gave up the nice Manhattan brownstone and moved upstate, away from Institut Fermi and the
weekly seminar at Columbia, to a little junior college where Dad became one-third of the physics
department.
He hated the job, but it gave him plenty of time outside of class. He would stay locked in his
study all morning and evening, oblivious to us, trying to find where his thermodynamic proof had
gone wrong.
Mother left in less than a year, and I left as soon as I was old enough to take the Tamer
examination.
My nineteenth birthday came just three days after I graduated from gymnasium (we'd moved back to
Switzerland in 2042), and that morning I was the first one in line at the AED employment office in
downtown Geneva. The testing took two days, and of course I passed.
I went home and told Dad that I'd been accepted, and he forbade it. Those were the last words he
ever said to me. I didn't even see his face again until his funeral, nine years later.
Dad's attitude was the familiar one (then), that we had just come too far, too fast. Less than a
century had gone by between the first unmanned satellite and interstellar travel via the LMT. We
hadn't even finished cleaning up after the Industrial Revolution, he claimed-and here we were
planning to export the mess to the rest of the Galaxy. And war and et cetera. We should grow up
first, put a moratorium on the LMT until the race was philosophically mature enough to handle the
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt (4 of 77) [1/15/03 7:23:04 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt
vast opportunity.
Who was going to tell us when we'd grown up enough, he didn't say. People like him, presumably.
So I slammed the door on his silence and went on to the AED Academy in Colorado Springs.
(Reading over the above, I can see that it gives a pretty lopsided picture of my motives for
joining the AED. Although my father's extreme stance in the opposite camp was very important,
especially in keeping me from quitting the Academy when it got rough, I probably would have tried
to join no matter what my family situation was. The profession seemed romantic and interesting,
and my generation had grown up coveting it.)
I'm not the best Tamer to ask about "training evaluation." It took me six years to get through the
Academy (in those days a lot of people got through in four), even though I had no trouble with the
course work or the physical training. My semester reports were always marked "profiled for psych."
They've loosened up on this a bit, over the years. But when I was at the Academy there was one
quality they valued over all others, for the people who made up a Tamer team: icy self-control.
The kind of person who would face certain death with a slightly raised eyebrow.
They never got perfection, because they also were looking for qualities such as imagination and
resilience, rarely found in robots. But I did have to admit that all of my fellow students seemed
rather more self-possessed than I was. Mainly, I had one hell of a time controlling my temper.
They put me through psychoanalysis and situational therapy and even made me study Buddhism and
Taoism. But then they would test me with the damnedest things, and I would always flunk and get
profiled.
They liked to use ringers, for instance. I got a new roommate once who turned out to have been an
actor, and who spent a whole semester perfecting his role. He would borrow things and never return
them, express outrageous opinions without deigning to argue about them, contemptuously refuse to
study and yet get high grades. Plus a whole galaxy of small annoyances. And then, in the middle of
the study week preceding the semester's final exams, he sauntered into the room and announced that
he had won over my current lover. And he had revealed to her certain things. Things a man will
tell another man and feel protected by bond of gender.
I hoped the AED repaired his nose and fixed that kneecap. I left him there bleeding and went out
to walk through the snow, actually afraid I would kill him if I stayed in the room. I stomped
around until my fingers turned blue, then returned to find him gone, replaced by a note from my
psych counselor.
It turns out that the two extra years served me well later on. I took a heavy load of technical
electives, and things like discrete tectonics and atmosphere kinematics came in handy when we got
down to practical geoformy. With a broad, general knowledge of the physical and biological
sciences, I've always drawn more than my share of trailbreaker assignments. The first Tamer team
that goes to a planet has to have a couple of generalists aboard, to help decide what sort of
specialists will go on subsequent trips. And it's a lot more fun to crawl around an unexplored
planet than it is to go in with pick and shovel and geoform it. For me, anyhow.
Studying oriental philosophies didn't improve me the way the psych board hoped. But Taoism did
save my ass in a very direct way, in what I later learned was my final, make-or-break, situational
exam. It also involved an actor.
My Taoism instructor was a kindly old gentleman named Wu, full of humor and patience. I was headed
for Germany on summer break, and not planning to do any serious studying, but out of respect for
him I agreed to continue the I Ching readings. Even though I privately considered the book's
wisdom to be only slightly more profound than the little notes you get inside of fortune cookies.
So every morning I would compose myself with contemplation and prayer, trying not to feel silly,
and then ask the I Ching a general question about the day ahead of me. Then I'd toss the coins,
look up the proper commentary, and commit it to memory, so I could refer to it at various times
during the day.
I don't even remember the question I asked that morning before my final testing. But I'll never
forget the commentary:
Here a strong man is presupposed. It is true he does not fit in with his environment, inasmuch as
he is too brusque and pays too little attention to form. But he is upright in character, he meets
with (proper) response...
It struck me as oddly appropriate, and all day I walked around trying to be not-brusque and
proper. That night, as I had done every night since coming to Heidelberg, I went to a quiet,
inexpensive bar down the block from my hotel to read and relax from the day's sightseeing.
A bellicose drunk was abusing the bartender for not serving him. I watched the argument for a
while, noted privately that the big fellow could use a dose of the I Ching more than another
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt (5 of 77) [1/15/03 7:23:04 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt
drink, and returned to my reading.
I looked up when the argument stopped, and in the mirror behind the bar caught a glimpse of the
drunk lurching by behind me. Then for no reason he picked up an empty stein and tried with all his
might to brain me with it.
I didn't know it at the time, but the AED was not going to allow me a seventh year of training.
They didn't care whether I got my brains bashed out for inattention or stopped the assault by
simply punching the guy. Or breaking his back; he was getting paid enough to compensate for a long
hospital stay or a prison term for second-degree murder.
Either way, I would have flunked out.
But I saw it coming and grabbed his wrist and twisted the stein away from him. I set it on the bar
and asked him, "Do I know you?" in pretty good German, in a low voice. When he responded with a
stream of bilingual invective, I told the bartender to call a cop. The "drunk" left.
The anger, bitter anger, hit me a few minutes later, in trembles and cold sweats and grinding
teeth. But instead of going off in a rage, finding the guy and pulverizing him, I remembered who I
was trying to be, and kept it bottled up. And wound up spending the rest of the short evening on
my knees in the john.
There were three other people in the bar, and one of them was an AED observer. The next day, I got
my papers.
3
Personnel Report
Satellit Ubersendung Mitteilung ITT
ZU John Thomas Riley VON Hermann Kranz RECHNUNG- DATTEL ZEIT
Director of Personnel Abgeordnete fur Mann NUMMER
AED Academy schaften
Kabel Adresse: AED Munchen 01 285 78496 20 Jull 51 02.10
Starseed Deutschland
Kollekt
My Dear Riley:
As directed, I was present at the informal testing of Tamer Candidate Jacuqe Lefavre. I am trying
to reach you by telephone, but get no response from your office or home. You must be in the early
evening; it is 2.00 AM here.
It is my pleasure to report that Candidate Lefavre reacted with dignity and restraint. He was
obviously very angered by the encounter, but contained his anger even when the effort made him
physically ill.
I was reading on the train to Heidelbert your profile of Candidate Lefavre and had myself
developed quite a "case of nerves." I was certain that here tonight I would see, one man or the
other, murdered. But I think that, in your analysis, that Candidate Lefavre would perform much
better under extreme stress than he does in a classroom situation, you were completely correct.
A tape of the confrontation was made from a ceiling camera, and will be forwarded to your office
along with my complete report. When you see it, I think you will agree with my evaluation, that
Herr Lefavre deserves no less than a 1,000 stress response rating.
I spoke to Herr Lefavre at the bar, before the actor began his job. His German is bad even for a
Swiss. But he seems to be a personable young fellow, and I look forward to meeting him under less
artificial circumstances.
Susanne and I will be in Colorado next month, and we look very much forward to calling on you.
Cordially
Kranz
4
Roster
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt (6 of 77) [1/15/03 7:23:04 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt
GROOMBRIDGE 1618 MISSION,
17 AUGUST 2051
PERSONNEL:
1. TAMER 4 TANIA JEEVES. FEMALE, 31. 8TH MISSION. SUPERVISOR.
2. TAMER 1 HSI CH'ING. MALE, 23. FIRST MISSION.
3. TAMER 1 VIVIAN HERRICK. FEMALE, 23. FIRST MISSION.
4. TAMER 1 JACQUE LEFAVRE. MALE, 25. FIRST MISSION.
5. TAMER 1 CAROL WACHAL. FEMALE, 24. FIRST MISSION.
EQUIPMENT:
5 GENERAL-PURPOSE EXPLORATION MODULES W/ STANDARD EQUIPMENT
1 PERSONNEL RECORDER
1 HOMING FLOATER (SECOND SHOT)
POWER REQUIREMENT:
2 SHOTS 7.49756783002 SU, TUNING @ LOCAL TIME
13:21 :47.94099BDK477
13:27:32.08386BDK477
MISSION PRIORITY 5.
FUNDING #733089 TRAINING.
5
Chapter One
Jacque Lefavre's first world was to be the second planet out from Groombridge 1618. It wasn't an
especially promising place; the planets accompanying small stars rarely pan out. They wouldn't
have wasted an experienced team on it.
Tama Jeeves was helping Jacque adjust his suit's biometric readout. "Ten to one it's just a rock.
A hot rock or a cold one, we'll see."
The five of them were standing around the Colorado Springs ready room, having a last cup of coffee
while putting their suits through final checks. They would be living in the suits for the next
eight days.
"You don't think we'll find anything interesting, then?" Carol Wachal said. "Just an expensive
training exercise?"
"Well, it's always interesting. No two are alike, not even the rocks."
"But you don't think we'll find any life?" Jacque said.
Tania shrugged and snapped shut the lid of the readout box. "I wouldn't expect a Howard Johnson's.
Maybe fossils; maybe some tough species like the Martian nodules."
A door at the other end of the room opened and a technician looked in. "Ten minutes," he said.
"Right after the next incoming." The door led to the staging area, where their suits would be
sterilized. Once clean, they would go on to the vacuum chamber that held the LMT crystal.
"Time to zip up," Tania said. She pulled the tunic up over her head and tossed it into a locker.
The others did the same.
Jacque noticed that Ch'ing discreetly avoided looking directly at his female teammates. Jacque
himself lacked that particular grace, but at least had the politeness to examine each woman with
equal interest Carol returned his stare and added a deadpan wink.
All five were in excellent physical condition and attractive in spite of their hairlessness and
rather overdeveloped muscles. Tania had faint stretch marks from having given birth six times on
three different planets, and hairline cosmetic surgery scars under each breast. But they were
marks of her profession and didn't detract from her beauty.
Out of reflex vanity, Jacque stood in such a way that the women couldn't see his back. It looked
as if someone had kept score on it-with an axe. Twelve years before, he had been chased down an
alley and pinned to the ground by four men while a fifth tried to find his kidneys with a straight
razor. This was evidently done for amusement, as they already had his wallet. He and his father
moved back to Europe as soon as he got out of the hospital.
The suit, or "general-purpose exploration module," was a roughly man-shaped machine that could
keep a hardy person alive for as long as a month in the middle of a blast furnace or swaddled in
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt (7 of 77) [1/15/03 7:23:04 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt
liquid hydrogen. Inside it, one could stomp through a hurricane without being blown over, walk the
ocean floor without being crushed, or pick up a kitten without hurting it.
It had several tools that weren't obviously weapons. With them and with the help of the suit's
strength-amplification circuitry, one could: make a pretzel out of a steel bar; reduce a city to
rubble; run around the equator of a small world in a week. But it took you five minutes of
contortions to scratch your nose, and certain other parts of the anatomy were simply inaccessible.
You learned to live with it.
The suits were damned expensive and rather difficult to operate. Simpler attire was available for
worlds where the conditions were known ahead of time. But it was profitable to outfit a planet's
first Tamer team this way, since the only alternative was to send an unmanned probe ahead first.
And the biggest expense in any Levant-Meyer Translation was energy, which was the same whether you
were transporting a fully outfitted team or a small probe. Or a rusty beer can, for that matter.
Someone who was body-modest or squeamish could never learn to get along with a GPEM suit. You
became too intimately a part of it; it recycled everything. Fortunately, those who got past all
the tests and training to finally become Tamers couldn't possibly be squeamish. And modesty was
unlikely to be a strong force in their character.
Fitting yourself into the rigid suit was an operation similar to what a medieval knight had to go
through to get into his armor. From a waist-high platform you lowered yourself into the bottom
half. While your arms are still free, you hooked up the abdominal and femoral sensors and relief
channels. Then a crane lowered the top half of the suit over you while you held your arms up, so
that they slid easily into the suit's arms. (Which was the reason for the difficulty in scratching
your nose. There was just enough room inside the suit to twist and turn and manage to get one hand
free without dislocating your shoulder. But it took time and determination.) An automatic locking
mechanism sealed the top half to the bottom. With your tongue and chin you turned on the suit's
radio and optical circuits... and you were ready to go.
Jacque clicked on his radio. "I've never been in one of these things for a week," he said. "It
must get pretty ripe after a few days."
"Some people, yes," Tania said. "It's all in your head."
That's right, Jacque thought, my nose is in my head. He experimented with the image amplifier,
tonguing it from infrared to ultraviolet and back. It didn't make much difference in the
indirectly lit room; the pastel colors just washed out and came back.
"Well," Ch'ing said. "Shall we-"
The door swung open and four suited figures came into the room, moving easily in their tonne-
weight suits. Just returned from God-knows-where, their suits had a coating of pale blue dust. A
thrill moved up Jacque's back and set his scalp prickling, a feeling he had subdued for the past
six years, knowing that not one candidate in twenty actually made Tamer 1.
He was going off the earth. Even if it turned out to be just an airless slab of cold granite, it
was a place that no human had ever seen before.
"Let's go." They followed Tania into the sterilizing room, a cubicle with mirrors for walls,
floor, and ceiling. Every half meter there was a slender ultraviolet-to-gamma tube. "Keep well
spread apart. At least a meter between your outstretched arm and the next person."
The reflections of the five people bounced back and forth, multiplying them into a vast army that
stretched to the horizon in every direction. The door sealed and a pump throbbed somewhere,
sucking air out of the chamber.
"Turn off your eyes." The feeling of being in the middle of a huge crowd was replaced by
claustrophobia: sealed inside a roomy coffin. Jesus, Jacque thought, how long could you stay sane
if your opticals failed?
"Okay." They turned their eyes back on and followed her to the LMT chamber. Two technicians on the
other side of a window watched them file in. The light from the window was the only light in the
room, but it was adequate to show them the way to the crystal. "Four minutes, ten seconds."
The crystal was a glass gray circle, 120 centimeters in diameter. Tania stepped just over the edge
of it.
"Carol, you can be on the bottom with me. Ch'ing and Vivian next, then Jacque on top." Here any
similarity between the GPEM suits and old-style armor vanished. Tania and Carol stood face to face
in the middle of the circle while the next two climbed up to stand on their shoulders. Then Jacque
clambered over all of them to be King of the Mountain. The gyroscopic stabilizers that ringed
their suits' waists kept the fragile pyramid from collapsing.
A glowing yellow cylinder of translucent plastic slid down over them. This was just a guide to
keep them inside the LMT field; they were safe so long as they stayed a couple of centimeters from
the plastic. Anything not inside the field when the current pulse came would simply be left
behind. It didn't have to be an arm or a leg; just a little piece of the suit would be more than
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt (8 of 77) [1/15/03 7:23:04 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt
enough.
"Ninety seconds." Nobody said anything. "Thirty seconds."
"Hot or cold?" Vivian said. "Any bets?"
"Bet you a dollar it'll be just like Earth," Carol said. "But you'll have to give me a thousand to
one. Ten thousand."
"Yeah," Jacque said. "Biosphere must be thin as an eggshe-"
6
Biospheres: Classroom 2041
SCENE: Classroom in an exclusive, old-fashioned private school in upstate New York. Drowsy hot day
in late spring, airco broken.
CAST OF CHARACTERS: TEACHER is William J. Gilbert, M.A., this form's instructor in the physical
sciences. He is annoyed at the class's lack of attention but thinks he has hit upon a device that
will liven things up. JACQUE LEFAVRE did not do the previous night's homework and doesn't know a
biosphere from a bowling ball. Two days before, he has officially dropped the terminal "S" from
his name (because he was tired of being called "zhocks") and, instead of taking notes, he is
practicing his new signature. Assorted STUDENTS and one FLY.
TEACHER
Sitting on the desk-trying not to seem stiff.
I think that the text's explanation of the biosphere is rather obscure.
Gets off the desk, stiffly.
Do you agree, Mary?
FIRST STUDENT
Yes, sir. But I think I understood it.
SECOND STUDENT
Whispers to Third STUDENT:
Jesus, what a brown-nose.
TEACHER
Did you have something to say, Ronald?
SECOND STUDENT
No, sir. Just that I think I understood it, too.
Class reacts predictably.
TEACHER
You have no idea how happy that makes me.
Reaches in drawer and brings out a navel orange.
Perhaps a demonstration will make it equally clear to everybody.
Produces pocket knife and opens it with a flourish.
How many people have had calculus and analytic geometry?
Only three hands go up as he carefully cuts through the skin and rind, making a circle around the
middle of the orange.
Very well, then. I won't call this a locus.
He twists and worries at the orange until he has three pieces: the fruit and two hemispheres. He
sets the fruit aside.
These two halves of the skin and rind will be our biosphere model.
He puts the two hemispheres together.
Imagine, if you will, that there is a tiny star in the center of this sphere.
He sets down one half and points to the inside of the other with a pencil.
Since the star is in the center, any point on this rind is going to be the same distance from the
star. Thus, every point on the rind will get the same amount of energy from the star, and will be
at the same temperature.
Taps the outside.
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt (9 of 77) [1/15/03 7:23:04 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt
Likewise with the skin. Same distance all around, same temperature. A little cooler than the
inside.
FOURTH STUDENT
Inverse square law.
TEACHER
Very good, Stan. But please don't interrupt..
A FLY has entered the room and is buzzing very loudly, trying to escape through the windowscreen.
The TEACHER glances at it for a moment, then continues.
TEACHER
We will say that the temperature of the inside of the rind is a hundred degrees Centigrade, the
boiling point of water. The outside skin is where the temperature is zero degrees, the freezing
point.
Now, Mary. Will you tell the class what that means?
FIRST STUDENT
Quickly:
It means that the only place in the system where you can have liquid water is the volume that
corresponds to the rind of the orange.
TEACHER
Very good. What else?
FIRST STUDENT
After a moment:
Everywhere else you'll just have steam and ice?
TEACHER
Looks at the FLY again but decides not to go after it.
That's true, but it's not exactly what I'm looking for. Anybody else? Mark?
FOURTH STUDENT
Puts down hand.
Where there's no liquid water, you can't have life as we know it. Because carbon-based life needs
water...
TEACHER
-as a more-or-less universal solvent, that's right. And that's why we call it the biosphere. Bios
is Greek for life, and only in this sphere can life exist. Amy?
FIFTH STUDENT
But last year in Biology Miz Harkness said that a biosphere was all the air and water and ground
on Earth, where plants and animals can live.
TEACHER
Gruffly:
A word can have more than one meaning.
The FLY stops buzzing and JACQUE looks over at it. JACQUE has been trying to look inconspicuous,
but it's difficult because he's the largest one in the room, and the vagaries of the alphabet have
put him in the front row.
TEACHER
Jacque? Could I have your attention?
JACQUE
Yes, sir.
JACQUE has lived in America for eleven years and has no trace of a French accent. When he returns
to Switzerland in nine months, with a slowly healing back, he will have lost forever the musical
Lausanne accent that surrounded him as a child, and will speak his native tongue like an educated
foreigner.
file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txt (10 of 77) [1/15/03 7:23:04 PM]
摘要：

file:///F|/rah/Joe%20Haldeman/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Mindbridge.txtMINDBRIDGEJoeHaldemanWHATMUSTHUMANITYLEARNABOUTITSELFTOSURVIVE?"Haldemancreatesreal,humancharacters.Theyarethree-dimensionalinpain,fear,andlove."CincinnatiEnquirer"DAZZLING...soarsintospeculationonthefutureofhumanity.Icouldn'tputitdow...

展开>> 收起<<
Haldeman, Joe - Mindbridge.pdf

共77页,预览16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：77 页 大小：230.57KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-15

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 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 77
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注