（外文电子版资料）Larry Niven - Inferno.doc

INFERNO by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (c) 1976 by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle v1.1 (Jan-24-1999) If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version number by 0.1 and redistribute. CHAPTER 1 I thought about being dead. I could remember every silly detail of that silly last performance. I was dead at the end of it. But how could I think about being dead if I had died? I thought about that, too, after I stopped having hysterics. There was plenty of time to think. Call me Allen Carpentier. Its the name I wrote under, and someone will remember it. I was one of the best-known science-fiction writers in the world, and I had a lot of fans. My stories werent the kind that win awards, but they entertained, and I had written a lot of them. The fans all knew me. Someone ought to remember me. It was the fans who killed me. At least, they let me do it. Its an old game. At science-fiction conventions the fans try to get their favorite author washed-out stinking drunk. Then they can go home and tell stories about how Allen Carpentier really tied one on and they were right there to see it. They add to the stories until legends are built around what writers do at conventions. Its all in fun. They really like me, and I like them. I think I do. But the fans vote the Hugo awards, and you have to be popular to win. Id been nominated five times for awards and never won one, and I was out to make friends that year. Instead of hiding in a back booth with other writers I was at a fan party, drinking with a roomful of short ugly kids with pimples, tall serious Harvard types, girls with long stringy hair, half-pretty girls half-dressed to show it, and damn few people with good manners. Remember the drinking party in War and Peace? Where one of the characters bets he can sit on a window ledge and drink a whole bottle of rum without touching the sides? I made the same bet... The convention hotel was a