（外文电子版资料）Benford, Gregory - If the stars are Gods.pdfVIP

file:///F|/rah/Gregory%20Benford/Benford,%20Gregory%20-%20If%20the%20Stars%20are%20Gods.txt GORDON EKLUND and GREGORY BENFORD If the Stars Are Gods Gordon Eklund was born in Seattle, served four years in the Air Force, and now lives in the San Francisco Bay area. His first published story was a Nebula Award finalist in 1971. Since then he has published some four dozen stories and five novels, including The Eclipse of Dawn, Beyond the Resurrection, and All Times Possible. He is a full-time writer. Gregory Benford is a part-time writer and a full-time associate professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, currently working in the areas of plasma turbulence and the dynamics of relativistic electron beams. He has published numerous articles on science and two science-fiction novels, Deeper than the Darkness and Jupiter Project. They have collaborated on a Nebula Award-winning story about strange aliens and their even stranger beliefs. A dog cannot be a hypocrite, but neither can he be sincere. -LUDWIG Wittgenstein It was deceptively huge and massive, this alien starship, and somehow seemed as if it belonged almost anywhere else in the universe but here. Reynolds stepped carefully down the narrow corridor of the ship, still replaying in his minds eye the approach to the air lock, the act of being swallowed. The ceilings were high, the light poor, the walls made of some dull, burnished metal. These aspects and others flitted through his mind as he walked. Reynolds. was a man who appreciated the fine interlacing pleasures of careful thought, but more than that, thinking so closely of these things kept his mind occupied and drove away the smell. It clung to him like Pacific fog. Vintage manure, Reynolds had decided the moment he passed through the air lock. Turning, he had glared at Kelly firmly encased inside her suit. He told her about the smell. Everybody stinks, she had said, evenly, perhaps joking, perhaps not, and pushed hi