JК
World Of Ptavvs :: Нивен Ларри
Страница: 27 из 127There were the two habitable binary thirds, the giant fifths, the asteroid belts, similar in position if not in density, the correspondence of size and position of the first eight planets of each system, the ringed sixth it was almost too much to believe.
Oh, Powerloss. Kzanol/Greenberg sighed and cracked his knuckles, badly frightening himself. It was too much to believe. He didn't believe it.
Suddenly he was very tired. Thrintun was very far away in an unknown direction. The amplifier helmet, and everything else he owned, were probably equally unreachable in a completely different direction. His Power was gone, and even his body had been stolen by some terrifying slave sorcery. But worst of all, he had no idea what to do next!
A city rose in the distance. His car was making straight for it. He was about to steer around it when he realized it must be Topeka. So he put his head in his arms and wished he could lose consciousness again. The strength seemed to have leaked out of him.
This had to be F124.
But it couldn't be. The system had an extra world and not enough asteroids.
But, he remembered, Pluto was supposed to be a stowaway in the solar system. There was its queer orbit, and some mathematical discrepancy in its size. Perhaps it was captured by Sol before he awakened.
But in three hundred years? Highly unlikely.
Kzanol raised his face, and his face showed terror. He knew perfectly well that three hundred years was his lower limit; the brain board had given him a three-hundred-year journey using half the ship's power. He might have been buried much longer than that.
Suppose he accepted Pluto. What about the slave race, happily living where there should have been only yeast, covering the oceans a foot deep, or at most whitefoods, big as brontosaurs and twice as pretty, wandering along the shorelines feeding on mutated scum?
He couldn't explain it, so he dropped it.
But the asteroid belt was certainly thinner than it had been. True, it would have thinned out anyway in time, what with photon pressure and solar wind pushing dust and the smaller particles outward into deep space, and collisions with the bigger planets removing a few rocks, and even some of the most eccentric asteroids being slowed and killed by friction with the solar atmosphere which must extend well past Earth. But that was not a matter for a few hundred years. Or even thousands. Or hundreds of-
And he knew.
Not hundreds of years, or hundreds of thousands.
Oh, Powerloss. Kzanol/Greenberg sighed and cracked his knuckles, badly frightening himself. It was too much to believe. He didn't believe it.
Suddenly he was very tired. Thrintun was very far away in an unknown direction. The amplifier helmet, and everything else he owned, were probably equally unreachable in a completely different direction. His Power was gone, and even his body had been stolen by some terrifying slave sorcery. But worst of all, he had no idea what to do next!
A city rose in the distance. His car was making straight for it. He was about to steer around it when he realized it must be Topeka. So he put his head in his arms and wished he could lose consciousness again. The strength seemed to have leaked out of him.
This had to be F124.
But it couldn't be. The system had an extra world and not enough asteroids.
But, he remembered, Pluto was supposed to be a stowaway in the solar system. There was its queer orbit, and some mathematical discrepancy in its size. Perhaps it was captured by Sol before he awakened.
But in three hundred years? Highly unlikely.
Kzanol raised his face, and his face showed terror. He knew perfectly well that three hundred years was his lower limit; the brain board had given him a three-hundred-year journey using half the ship's power. He might have been buried much longer than that.
Suppose he accepted Pluto. What about the slave race, happily living where there should have been only yeast, covering the oceans a foot deep, or at most whitefoods, big as brontosaurs and twice as pretty, wandering along the shorelines feeding on mutated scum?
He couldn't explain it, so he dropped it.
But the asteroid belt was certainly thinner than it had been. True, it would have thinned out anyway in time, what with photon pressure and solar wind pushing dust and the smaller particles outward into deep space, and collisions with the bigger planets removing a few rocks, and even some of the most eccentric asteroids being slowed and killed by friction with the solar atmosphere which must extend well past Earth. But that was not a matter for a few hundred years. Or even thousands. Or hundreds of-
And he knew.
Not hundreds of years, or hundreds of thousands.