（外文电子版资料）Larry Niven - Wait It Out.doc

WAIT IT OUT Larry Niven Night on Pluto. Sharp and distinct, the horizon line cuts across my field of vision. Below that broken line is the dim gray-white of snow seen by starlight. Above, space-blackness and spacebright stars. From behind a jagged row of frozen mountains the stars pour up in singletons and clusters and streamers of cold white dots. Slowly they move, but visibly, just fast enough for a steady eye to capture their motion. Something wrong there. Plutos rotation period is long: 6.39 days. Time must have slowed for me. It should have stopped. I wonder if I may have made a mistake. The planets small size brings the horizon close. It seems even closer without a haze of atmosphere to fog the distances. Two sharp peaks protrude into the star swarm like the filed front teeth of a cannibal warrior. In the cleft between those peaks shines a sudden bright point. I recognize the Sun, though it shows no more disk than any other, dimmer star. The Sun shines as a cold point between the frozen peaks; it pulls free of the rocks and shines in my eyes . . . The Sun is gone, the starfield has shifted. I must have passed out. It figures. Have I made a mistake? It wont kill me if I have. It could drive me mad, though . . . I dont feel mad. I dont feel anything, not pain, not loss, not regret, not fear. Not even pity. Just: what a situation. Gray-white against gray-white: the landing craft, short and wide and conical, stands half-submerged in an icy plain below the level of my eyes. Here I stand, looking east, waiting. Take a lesson: this is what comes of not wanting to die. Pluto was not the most distant planet. It had stopped being that in 1979, ten years ago. Now Pluto was at perihelion, as close to the Sun-and to Earth-as it would ever get. To ignore such an opportunity would have been sheer waste. And so we came, Jerome and Sammy and 1, in an inflated plastic bubble poised on an ion jet. Wed spent a year and a half in that bubble. After so long together, with so li