（外文电子版资料）Larry Niven - At the Bottom Hole.doc

PAGE 1 AT THE BOTTOM OF A HOLE Larry Niven After more than a century of space travel, Mans understanding of his own solar system was nearly complete. So he moved on to industrial development. The next hundred years saw the evolution of a civilization in space. For reasons of economy the Belters concentrated on the wealth of the asteroids. With fusion-driven ships they could have mined the planets; but their techniques were more universally applicable in free fall and among the falling mountains. Only Mercury was rich enough to attract the Belt miners. For a time Earth was the center of the space industries. But the lifestyles of Belter and flatlander were so different that a split was inevitable. The flatland phobia-the inability to tolerate even an orbital flight-was common on Earth, and remained so. And there were Belters who would never go anywhere near a planet. Between Earth and the Belt there was economic wrestling, but never war. The cultures needed each other. And they were held together by a common bond: the conquest of the stars. The rambots - the unmanned Bussard ramjet probes-were launched during the mid twenty-first century. By 2100 AD, five nearby solar systems held budding colonies: the worlds were jinx, Wunderland, We Made It, Plateau, and Down. None of these worlds was entirely Earthlike. Those who programed the ramrobots had used insufficient imagination. Some results are detailed in this collection. On Earth, three species of cetacean had been recognized as intelligent and admitted to the United Nations. Their lawsuit against the former whaling nations had not been resolved, and in fact never was. The cetaceans enjoyed the legal gymnastics too much ever to end it. Twelve stories below the roof gardens were citrus groves, grazing pastures, and truck farms. They curved out from the base of the hotel in neat little squares, curved out and up, and up, and up and over. Five miles overhead was the fusion sunlight tube, running down the radius of the sl