[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
I ve been doing some high school geometry. He grinned. Dipping the thing in water was the only way
I could think of to measure its volume seeing how the water level in the bucket goes up and down.
Eureka! de Morgan cried playfully. Sir, you are the Archimedesde nos jours . . .
Abdikadir ignored him. I took a dozen measurements, hoping to drive down the errors, but it still won t
be too hot. I can t think of a way of getting the surface area at all. But my measurements of the radius
and circumference are pretty good, I think. He held up a jury-rigged set of calipers. I adapted a laser
sight from the chopper . . .
I don t get it, said Casey. It s just a sphere. If you know the radius you can work out the rest from all
those formulae. The surface area is, what, four times pi times the radius squared . . .
You can work that out if you make the assumption that this sphere is like every other sphere you ve
encountered before, Abdi said mildly. But here it is floating in the air, like nothing I ve ever seen. I
didn t want to make any assumptions about it; I wanted to check everything I could.
Bisesa nodded. And you found
For a start, it is a perfect sphere. He glanced up again. And I meanperfect, within the tolerances even
of my laser measurements, in every axis I tried. Even in 2037 we couldn t shape any material to such a
fantastic degree of precision.
De Morgan nodded soberly. An almost arrogant display of geometrical perfection.
Yes. But that s just the start. Abdikadir held up his watch so Bisesa could see its tiny screen. Your
high school geometry, Casey. The ratio of a circle s circumference to its diameter is . . . ?
Pi, rumbled Casey. Even a jock Christian knows that much.
Well, not in this case. The ratio for the Eye isthree.Not about three, or a bit more than three three, to
laser precision. My error bars are so small it s quite impossible that the ratio is actually pi, as it ought to
be. Your formulae don t work after all, you see, Casey. I get the same number for pi from the volume.
Although of course my reliability is way down; you can t compare a laser with a bucket of dusty water . .
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.
Bisesa stood and walked around the Eye, peering up at it. She continued to have an uneasy sense about
it. That s impossible. Pi is pi. The number is embedded in the structure of our universe.
Ouruniverse, yes, Abdikadir said.
What do you mean?
Abdikadir shrugged. It seems that this sphere though it is evidentlyhere is not quite of our universe.
We seem to have stumbled into anomalies in time, Bisesa. Perhaps this is an anomaly in space.
If that s so, Casey rumbled, who or what caused it? And what are we supposed to do about it?
There was, of course, no answer.
Captain Grove came bustling up. Sorry to trouble you, Lieutenant, he said to Bisesa. You ll
remember the scouting patrols I ve been sending out one of thesowarshas reported something rather
odd, to the north of here.
Odd, Casey said. God love your British understatement!
Grove was unperturbed. You might be able to make more of it than any of my chaps . . . I wondered if
you fancied a short excursion?
11: STRANDED IN SPACE
Hey, asshole, I need the john. That was Sable, of course, yelling up from the descent compartment,
welcoming Kolya to another day.
He had been dreaming of home, of Nadia and the boys. Hanging in his sleeping bag like a bat from a
fruit tree, with only the dim red glow of low-power emergency lights around him, it took him a few
moments to realize where he was.Oh. I am still here.Still in this half-derelict spacecraft, endlessly circling
an unresponsive Earth. For a moment he floated, clinging to the last remnants of sleep.
He was in the living compartment, along with their spacesuits and other unnecessary gear, and
surrounded by the junk from the Station that they still carried with them they could hardly open the
hatch to throw it out. His sleeping up here gave them all a little more space, or, to put it another way,
stopped three stir-crazy cosmonauts from killing each other. But it was scarcely comfortable. He could
still smell the rotting discarded underwear, the Cossack jockstraps, as Sable had put it.
He groaned, squirmed and pulled himself out of his sleeping bag. He made his way to the little toilet,
opened it out from the wall, and activated the pumps that would draw his waste out into the emptiness of
space. When they had realized they were going to be stuck on orbit, they had had to dig out this lavatory
from under the heaps of garbage; their journey home had been meant to last only a few hours, and toilet
breaks hadn t been scheduled. This morning it took him a while to finish. He was dehydrated, and his
urine was thick, almost painfully acidic, as if reluctant to leave his body.
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
Wearing only his longjohn underwear he found himself shivering. To maximize theSoyuz s endurance [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl karpacz24.htw.pl
I ve been doing some high school geometry. He grinned. Dipping the thing in water was the only way
I could think of to measure its volume seeing how the water level in the bucket goes up and down.
Eureka! de Morgan cried playfully. Sir, you are the Archimedesde nos jours . . .
Abdikadir ignored him. I took a dozen measurements, hoping to drive down the errors, but it still won t
be too hot. I can t think of a way of getting the surface area at all. But my measurements of the radius
and circumference are pretty good, I think. He held up a jury-rigged set of calipers. I adapted a laser
sight from the chopper . . .
I don t get it, said Casey. It s just a sphere. If you know the radius you can work out the rest from all
those formulae. The surface area is, what, four times pi times the radius squared . . .
You can work that out if you make the assumption that this sphere is like every other sphere you ve
encountered before, Abdi said mildly. But here it is floating in the air, like nothing I ve ever seen. I
didn t want to make any assumptions about it; I wanted to check everything I could.
Bisesa nodded. And you found
For a start, it is a perfect sphere. He glanced up again. And I meanperfect, within the tolerances even
of my laser measurements, in every axis I tried. Even in 2037 we couldn t shape any material to such a
fantastic degree of precision.
De Morgan nodded soberly. An almost arrogant display of geometrical perfection.
Yes. But that s just the start. Abdikadir held up his watch so Bisesa could see its tiny screen. Your
high school geometry, Casey. The ratio of a circle s circumference to its diameter is . . . ?
Pi, rumbled Casey. Even a jock Christian knows that much.
Well, not in this case. The ratio for the Eye isthree.Not about three, or a bit more than three three, to
laser precision. My error bars are so small it s quite impossible that the ratio is actually pi, as it ought to
be. Your formulae don t work after all, you see, Casey. I get the same number for pi from the volume.
Although of course my reliability is way down; you can t compare a laser with a bucket of dusty water . .
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
.
Bisesa stood and walked around the Eye, peering up at it. She continued to have an uneasy sense about
it. That s impossible. Pi is pi. The number is embedded in the structure of our universe.
Ouruniverse, yes, Abdikadir said.
What do you mean?
Abdikadir shrugged. It seems that this sphere though it is evidentlyhere is not quite of our universe.
We seem to have stumbled into anomalies in time, Bisesa. Perhaps this is an anomaly in space.
If that s so, Casey rumbled, who or what caused it? And what are we supposed to do about it?
There was, of course, no answer.
Captain Grove came bustling up. Sorry to trouble you, Lieutenant, he said to Bisesa. You ll
remember the scouting patrols I ve been sending out one of thesowarshas reported something rather
odd, to the north of here.
Odd, Casey said. God love your British understatement!
Grove was unperturbed. You might be able to make more of it than any of my chaps . . . I wondered if
you fancied a short excursion?
11: STRANDED IN SPACE
Hey, asshole, I need the john. That was Sable, of course, yelling up from the descent compartment,
welcoming Kolya to another day.
He had been dreaming of home, of Nadia and the boys. Hanging in his sleeping bag like a bat from a
fruit tree, with only the dim red glow of low-power emergency lights around him, it took him a few
moments to realize where he was.Oh. I am still here.Still in this half-derelict spacecraft, endlessly circling
an unresponsive Earth. For a moment he floated, clinging to the last remnants of sleep.
He was in the living compartment, along with their spacesuits and other unnecessary gear, and
surrounded by the junk from the Station that they still carried with them they could hardly open the
hatch to throw it out. His sleeping up here gave them all a little more space, or, to put it another way,
stopped three stir-crazy cosmonauts from killing each other. But it was scarcely comfortable. He could
still smell the rotting discarded underwear, the Cossack jockstraps, as Sable had put it.
He groaned, squirmed and pulled himself out of his sleeping bag. He made his way to the little toilet,
opened it out from the wall, and activated the pumps that would draw his waste out into the emptiness of
space. When they had realized they were going to be stuck on orbit, they had had to dig out this lavatory
from under the heaps of garbage; their journey home had been meant to last only a few hours, and toilet
breaks hadn t been scheduled. This morning it took him a while to finish. He was dehydrated, and his
urine was thick, almost painfully acidic, as if reluctant to leave his body.
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
Wearing only his longjohn underwear he found himself shivering. To maximize theSoyuz s endurance [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]