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Neutron Star [A Beowulf Shaeffer Story] [MultiFormat]
eBook by Larry Niven
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eBook Category: Science Fiction Hugo Award Winner
eBook Description: One of Niven's most beloved characters, Beowulf Shaeffer, is forced to take a dangerous mission to explore a neutron star. The last group who went there never came back alive, but Shaeffer faces life imprisonment if he doesn't take the job. Will he determine the mysterious force that turned the prior crew to hamburger before he suffers a similar fate?
eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: IF, 1966
Fictionwise Release Date: January 2001
This eBook is also available in the following bundle(s):
This eBook is part of the following series:
Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [104 KB], eReader (PDB) [35 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [22 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [21 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [42 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [92 KB], hiebook (KML) [80 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [52 KB], iSilo (PDB) [19 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [24 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [51 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [36 KB]
Words: 6947
Reading time: 19-27 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
 
An accosting by alien puppeteers as he quietly considers a multi-dialled control panel of an intrasystem yatch at an ordinary drugstore is not Beowulf Shaeffer's modus operandi of job finding. But, no longer chief pilot for Nakamura Lines, his debts are skyrocketing, and his needs cosmic. Undertaking the new assignment, in a study of hyperspace distortion, Beowulf finds himself in a baffling world. Here, muddled luminaries glint and an incomprehensible neutron star, or some invisible power about it, seems both keen and accomplished enough to propel his ship towards freefall, demolition and Beowulf's horrible death.
-Eugen Bacon, Fictionwise Recommender
The Skydiver dropped out of hyperspace an even million miles above the neutron star. I needed a minute to place myself against the stellar background and another to find the distortion Sonya Laskin had mentioned before she died. It was to my left, an area the apparent size of the Earth's moon. I swung the ship around to face it. Curdled stars, muddled stars, stars that had been stirred with a spoon. The neutron star was in the center, of course, though I couldn't see it and hadn't expected to. It was only eleven miles across, and cool. A billion years had passed since BVS-1 had burned by fusion fire. Millions of years, at least, since the cataclysmic two weeks during which BVS-1 was an X-ray star, burning at a temperature of five billion degrees Kelvin. Now it showed only by its mass. The ship began to turn by itself. I felt the pressure of the fusion drive. Without help from me, my faithful metal watchdog was putting me in a hyperbolic orbit that would take me within one mile of the neutron star's surface. Twenty-four hours to fall, twenty-four hours to rise ... and during that time something would try to kill me. As something had killed the Laskins. The same type of autopilot, with the same program, had chosen the Laskins' orbit. It had not caused their ship to collide with the star. I could trust the autopilot. I could even change its program. I really ought to. How did I get myself into this hole? The drive went off after ten minutes of maneuvering. My orbit was established in more ways than one. I knew what would happen if I tried to back out now.
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