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The Gravity Business | James E. Gunn | free podcast | аудиокниги слушать | #sifirdaningilizce
The flivver descended vertically toward the green planet circling the old, orange sun.

It was a spaceship, but not the kind men had once dreamed about. The flivver was shaped like a crude bullet, blunt at one end of a fat cylinder and tapering abruptly to a point at the other. It had been slapped together out of sheet metal and insulation board, and it sold, fully equipped, for $15,730. It didn't behave like a spaceship, either.

As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then, at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that.

A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright.

Then all was quiet—outside.

Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the air. "Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing practically whipped, too!"


Grampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed.

"Now, Grampa," Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had begun to gray at the temples. "That landing was pretty rough, Junior."

Junior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. "I know it, Fred," he said, frowning. "This world fooled me. It has a diameter less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as Earth."

Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, "Well, gosh, Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said, 'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium—'"

"That's enough, Four," Junior interrupted. "Never mind what I said."

Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.

"And, Four," Reba said automatically, "don't call your father 'Junior.' It sounds disrespectful."

Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever noticed about the boy.

"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'" Four complained. "Besides, Fred is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'"

"That's different," Reba said.

Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. "See!" The pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. "That landing made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again."

"Stop picking on Junior," Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. "I'm sure he did the best he could."

"Anybody talks about gravitational pull," Grampa said, snorting, "deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing, Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred years ago."

"Go back to your games, Grampa," Fred said impatiently. "We've got work to do."

Grampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last button on his pircuit. The last light went out. "You've got work to do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?"

"It belongs to all of us," Four said shrilly. "You gave us all a sixth share."

"That's right, Four," Grampa muttered, "so I did. But whose money bought it?"

"You bought it, Grampa," Fred said.

"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?"

"You, Grampa," Fred said.

"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?"

"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and longevity pills," Joyce said bitterly, "and fixed it so we'd have to go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly galaxy? You, Grampa!"

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