（外文电子版资料）Gregory Benford - A Worm in the Well.pdf

A Worm in the Well by Gregory Benford She was about to get baked, and all because she wouldnt freeze a man. Optical, Claire called. Erma obliged. The Sun spread around them, a bubbling plain. She had notched the air conditioning cooler but it didnt help much. Geysers burst in gaudy reds and actinic violets from the yellow-white froth. The solar coronal arch was just peeking over the horizon, like a wedding ring stuck halfway into boiling white mud. A monster, over two thousand kilometers long, sleek and slender and angry crimson. She turned down the cabin lights. Somewhere she had read that people felt cooler in the dark. The temperature in here was normal but she had started sweating. Tuning the yellows and reds dimmer on the big screen before her made the white-hot storms look more blue. Maybe that would trick her subconscious, too. Claire swung her mirror to see the solar coronal arch. Its image was refracted around the rim of the Sun, so she was getting a preview. Her orbit was on the descending slope of a long ellipse, its lowest point calculated to be just at the peak of the arch. So far, the overlay orbit trajectory was exactly on target. Software didnt bother with the heat, of course; gravitation was cool, serene. Heat was for engineers. And she was just a pilot. In her immersion-work environment, the touch controls gave her an abstract distance from the real physical surroundings—the plumes of virulent gas, the hammer of photons. She wasnt handling the mirror, of course, but it felt that way. A light, feathery brush, at a crisp, bracing room temperature. The imaging assembly hung on its pivot high above her ship. It was far enough out from their thermal shield to feel the full glare, so it was heating up fast. Pretty soon it would melt, despite its cooling system. Let it. She wouldnt need it then. Shed be o