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"I've never really understood it," Mirine confessed. "Somebody told me it's what stops the Sun from collapsing." "That's right." "How come?" "The atomic nuclei distort under the pressure as you get deeper inside. That causes their electric charges to a polarize, creating internal repulsion forces. The Terrans thought it was due to nuclear fusion photon pressure that the reactions going on in the photosphere happen deep in the interior." "They seem to have gotten a lot of things wrong," Mirine said. "The main reason Lorili wants to do the sequencing studies on these corpses is to see if she can make more sense out of the time scales. There's just too much in common between us and them biologically. She says they refused to see the evidence for the earlier unstable period in the Solar System because of what they went through. Admitting it would have been too traumatic." "Yes, Kyal and Bryskek are looking at all that too. There's a guy called Frazin who has a theory that what was repressed came out as their religions, and maybe helps explain why Terrans were so compulsively warlike." Yorim fell silent for a moment. Then he went on, "They were obsessed by bombs. I never thought about it that way before. They had to resort to wild quantum improbabilities to convince themselves it could work. But maybe that was why they made the Sun into one." They arrived at the pads and switched back into the common circuit while the canisters were loaded aboard the lander. When the last one had been hoisted into the cargo bay and was being fastened down, Mirine moved to the edge of the lighted zone around the pads to look once more over the chilling desolation of the lunar surface by starlight. She and the two technicians would be returning to Explorer 6 with the load. In her mind, she tried to imagine the last Terrans who had left this very place long ago, heading for where? What story did the mutilated Page 116 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html corpses, destroyed vehicles, and other signs of violence tell of? Probably no-one would ever know. A shadow darkened the light coming from behind. She realized that Yorim had joined her. "Bleak and lonely out there," he said. "That's just what I was thinking. And about the things that went on right here, all that time back. . . . Do you think they ever got there to Providence, wherever it was?" "Who can say? We only know that they left. If any ship that all this hardware was for were still here on Luna, we'd have found it by now." Mirine looked up at the shining canopy of stars. In the clarity of the lunar night, their different colors and shades were easily discernible, embedded in places in patches of wispy nebulas, crimson and violet. "Just imagine, their descendants could be out there somewhere right now," she said. We have Venus to return to a world with people, towns, a civilization, security. . . . They had nothing, did they? They were heading into a complete unknown. And even if they came back, what kind of prospect would they have faced to come back to? The aftermath of a worldwide war. And if it had been later still, their race extinct. Or was it the war that wiped them out, do you think? Nobody knows for sure, do they? . . . Yorim?" He had moved around so that the light from the pad illuminated his face through his visor, and was staring at her with a strange, fixed expression. "What's the matter?" Mirine asked him. "Say that again." His voice was odd, distant, as if his mind were racing over something. "What?" "About them coming back." "I said that if they came back, it would have been just to the survivors of a war. Or maybe to nobody at all. . . . Why?" "Before that. You said we have security and things to return to. . . . It's so obvious, isn't it? The same thoughts would have occurred to them too. They would have known that when the time came for them to return, it might be to a world that had been destroyed. So they'd leave behind some means to ensure their own survival, wouldn't they. That huge inventory of equipment and materials! It makes sense now." "Yorim, what are you talking about?" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |