精华区文章阅读

发信人: by (春天的小懒虫), 信区: SFworld
标  题: 2010 (16)
发信站: 哈工大紫丁香 (Wed Oct  6 14:38:19 1999), 转信

                            16
                     Private Line

'... Hello, Dimitri. This is Woody, switching to Key Two
in fifteen seconds... Hello, Dimitri - multiply Keys Three
and Four, take cube root, add pi squared and use nearest
integer as Key Five. Unless your computers are a million
times faster than ours - and I'm damn sure they're not - no
one can decrypt this, on your side or mine. But you may
have some explaining to do; anyway, you're good at that.
  `By the way, my usual excellent sources told me about the
failure of the latest attempt to persuade old Andrei to resign;
I gather that your delegation had no more luck than the
others, and you're still saddled with him as President. I'm
laughing my head off; it serves the Academy right. I know
he's over ninety, and growing a bit - well, stubborn. But
you won't get any help from me, even though I'm the
world's - sorry, Solar System's - leading expert on the
painless removal of elderly scientists.
  `Would you believe that I'm still slightly drunk? We felt
we deserved a little party, once we'd successfully rendez -
rendezvous, damn, rendezvoused with Discovery. Besides,
we had two new crew members to welcome aboard.
Chandra doesn't believe in alcohol - it makes you too
human - but Walter Curnow more than made up for him.
Only Tanya remained stone-cold sober, just as you'd
expect.
  `My fellow Americans - I sound like a politician, God
help me - came out of hibernation without any problems,
and are both looking forward to starting work. We'll all
have to move quickly; not only is time running out, but
Discovery seems to be in very bad shape. We could hardly
believe our eyes when we saw how its spotless white hull
had turned a sickly yellow.
  'Io's to blame, of course. The ship's spiralled down to
within three thousand kilometres, and every few days one
of the volcanoes blasts a few megatons of sulphur up into
the sky. Even though you've seen the movies, you can't
really imagine what it's like to hang above that inferno; I'll
be glad when we can get away, even though we'll be head-
ing for something much more mysterious - and perhaps far
more dangerous.
  'I flew over Kilauea during the '06 eruption; that was
mighty scary, but it was nothing - nothing - compared to
this. At the moment, we're over the nightside, and that
makes it worse. You can see just enough to imagine a lot
more. It's as close to Hell as 1 ever want to get...
  `Some of the sulphur lakes are hot enough to glow, but
most of the light comes from electrical discharges. Every
few minutes the whole landscape seems to explode, as if a
giant photoflash has gone off above it. And that's probably
not a bad analogy; there are millions of amps flowing in the
flux-tube linking Io and Jupiter, and every so often there's a
breakdown Then you get the biggest lightning flash in the
Solar System, and half our circuit-breakers jump out in
sympathy.
  `There's just been an eruption right on the terminator,
and I can see a huge cloud expanding up toward us, climb-
ing into the sunlight. I doubt if it will reach our altitude, and
even if it does it will be harmless by the time it gets here. But
it looks ominous - a space monster, trying to devour us.
  `Soon after we got here, I realized that Io reminded me of
something; it took me a couple of days to work it out, and
then I had to check with Mission Archives because the ship's
library couldn't help - shame on it. Do you remember how
I introduced you to The Lord (the Rings, when we were
kids back at that Oxford conference? Well, Io is Mordor:
look up Part Three. There's a passage about "rivers of
molten rock that wound their way... until they cooled and
lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented
earth." That's a perfect description: how did Tolkien know,
a quarter century before anyone ever saw a picture of Io?
Talk about Nature imitating Art.
  `At least we won't have to land there: 1 don't think that
even our late Chinese colleagues would have attempted
that. But perhaps one day it may be possible; there are areas
that seem fairly stable, and not continually inundated by
sulphur floods.
  `Who would have believed that we'd come all the way to
Jupiter, greatest of planets - and then ignore it. Yet that's
what we're doing most of the time; and when we're not
looking at Io or Discovery, we're thinking about the.
Artifact.
  `It's still ten thousand kilometres away, up there at the
libration point, but when I look at it through the main
telescope it seems close enough to touch. Because it's so
completely featureless, there's no indication of size, no way
the eye can judge it's really a couple of kilometres long. If
it's solid. it must weigh billions of tons.
  `But is it solid? It gives almost no radar echo, even when
it's square-on to us. We can see it only as a black silhouette
against the clouds of Jupiter, three hundred thousand
kilometres below. Apart from its size, it looks exactly like
the monolith we dug up on the Moon.
  `Well, tomorrow we'll go aboard Discovery, and I don't
know when I'll have time or opportunity to speak to you
again. But there's one more thing, old friend, before I sign
off.
  `It's Caroline. She's never really understood why I had to
leave Earth, and in a way I don't think she'll ever quite
forgive me. Some women believe that love isn't the only
thing - but everything. Perhaps they're right... anyway,
it's certainly too late to argue now.
  `Try and cheer her up when you have a chance. She talks
about going back to the mainland. I'm afraid that if she
does...
  'If you can't get through to her, try to cheer up Chris. I
miss him more than I care to say.
  `He'll believe Uncle Dimitri - if you say that his father
still loves him, and will be coming home just as quickly as
he can.'

--
           KK   KK    KK    KK     KK    KK
          KK  KK      KK  KK        KK  KK
         KKKK         KKKK           KKKK
        KK  KK        KK  KK          KK  KK
       KK    KK       KK    KK         KK    KK

※ 来源:·BBS 水木清华站 bbs.net.tsinghua.edu.cn·[FROM: 166.111.10.176]

--
:-) Helix@163.NET                                                    85958F57
:-( Helix@KALI.COM.CN                                                208CE12C
                                        简  爱                       CB384F06
                                                                     CC60E9F4
                           你-为-什-么-把-心-给-挖-走-了~~~ ?        54319BC9
                                                                     7EA2D22F

※ 来源:·饮水思源站 bbs.sjtu.edu.cn·[FROM: 202.120.5.220]

--
☆ 来源:．哈工大紫丁香 bbs.hit.edu.cn．[FROM: bingyang.bbs@bbs.sjt]

SFworld 版 (精华区)