《Sun Up》作者： - Howard Waldrop, A. A. Jackson【EPUB】

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SUN UP by A.A. Jackson IV and Howard Waldrop The robot exploration ship Saenger parked off the huge red sun. It was now a tiny dot ofstellar debris bathed in light five million nine hundred ninety-four thousand myriametersfrom the star. Its fusion ram had been silent for some time. It had coasted in on its reactionmotors like a squirrel climbing down a curved treetrunk. The ship Saenger was partly a prepackaged scientific laboratory partly a deep space probewith sections devoted to smaller launching platforms inflatable observatories assembly shops.The ship Saenger had a present crew of eighteen working robots. It was an advance researchstation sent unmanned to study this late-phase star. When it reached parking orbit it sentmessages back to its home world. In a year and a half the first shipful of scientists andworkers would come finding the station set up and work underway. The ship was mainly Saengera solid-state intelligence budded off the giant SSI on the Moon. Several hours after it docked off the sun Saenger knew it was going to die. There was a neutron star some 34 light-years away from Saenger and 53 light-years away from the earth. To look at it you wouldnt think it was any more than agalactic garbage dump. All you could tell by listening to it was that it was noisy full of X-rays that it rotated and that it interfered with everything up and down the wavelengths. Everything except Snapshot. Close in to the tiny roaring star closer than a man could go were a series of big chucks ofmetal that looked like solid debris. They were arrays of titanium and crystal vats of liquidnitrogen shielding deep inside were the real workings of Snapshot. Snapshot was in thebusiness of finding Ken wormholes in the froth of garbage given off by the star. Down at thePlanck length 10-35 cm the things appeared formed reappeared twisted broke off like steamon hot rocks. At one end of the wormholes was Snapshot and at the other was the Universe. Itsent messages from one end its scanners punching through the bubbling mass of waves and itkept track of what went where and who was talking to whom. Snapshots job was like that of a man trying to shoot into the hole of an invisible Swisscheese that was turning on three axes at 3300 rpm. And it had to remember which