”The Pak library was as old as the radioactive desert which surrounded it. How old was the library? Phssthpok never wondered and never knew how old the library was. However, the section on space travel was at least three million years old.
The library was huge and rambling, a composite of at least three million years of Pak knowledge, cross-filed into sections according to subject. Phssthpok spent thirty-two years in one vast room. A floor to ceiling labyrinth of bookshelves.
And there were books! They were nearly indestructible, those books. They would have emerged like fluttering meteors from the heat of a hydrogen fusion explosion.
There were treatises on the philosophy of space travel. There were records of interstellar and interplanetary flights, tens of thousands of them starting with a fantastic trip some group had made almost three million years ago.
There were technical texts on anything that could possibly bear on space and space travel: space craft, astrogation, ecology, miniaturization, nuclear and subnuclear physics, plastics, gravity and how to use it, astronomy astrophysics, records of the mining of worlds and nearby systems, diagrams of a hypothetical Bussard ramjet, ion drives diagrams, plasma theory, light sails…
Even though the libraries offerings were quite extensive, there are many holes in their collections. The Pak have been migrating for millions of years. These experiences could no way be included without someone from the original migration transmitted their manuscripts back to rom a system near the Galactic Core. Nor do you have the accounts of many victims of various wars that plagued this civilization. Those would have been accounts from protectors and the new weapons systems they invented to wipe out their opponents.”
Protector, Larry Niven
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