（外文电子版资料）Niven, Larry - Spirals.pdf

SPIRALS Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle There are always people who want to revise history. No hero is so great that someone won’t take a shot at him. Not even Jack Halfey. Yes, I knew Jack Halfey. You may not remember my name. But in the main airlock of industrial Station One there’s an inscribed block of industrial diamond, and my name is sixth down: Cornelius L. Riggs, Metallurgist. And you might have seen my face at the funeral. You must remember the funeral. All across the solar system work stopped while Jack Halfey took his final trek into the sun. He wanted it that way, and no spacer was going to refuse Jack Halfey’s last request, no matter how expensive it might be. Even the downers got in the act. They didn’t help pay the cost, but they spent hundreds of millions on sending reporters and cameras to the Moon.. That funeral damned near killed me. The kids who took me to the Moon weren’t supposed to let the ship take more than half a gravity. My bones are over a hundred years old, and they’re fragile. For that young squirt of a pilot the landing may have been smooth, but she hit a full gee for a second there, and I thought my time had come. I had to go, of course. The records say I was Jack’s best friend, the man who’d saved his life, and being one of the last survivors of the Great Trek makes me somebody special. Nothing would do but that I push the button to send Jack on his “final spiral into the sun.” to quote a downer reporter. I still see TriVee programs about ships “spiraling” into the sun. You’d think seventy years and more after the Great Trek the schools would teach kids something about space. When I staggered outside in lunar gravity-lighter than the 20% gravity we keep in the Skylark, just enough to feel the difference-the reporters were all over me. Why, they demanded, did Jack want to go into the sun? Cremation and scattering of ashes is good enough for most space