"Forward,.Dr.Robert.L.-.Ocean.Under.the.Ice.Book.3.of.the.Rocheworld.Series" - читать интересную книгу автора (Forward Robert L)
"Little Red is correct," James whispered through Richard's imp. "The transit of Zulu's shadow across Gargantua's face will start in thirty-two seconds."
"Let's watch it," said Richard, impressed that the immature and impetuous-behaving alien was also an intuitive mathematical genius with an IQ many times that of the smartest human. Little Red had reasoned out the complex mechanics and optics of the multimoon system after just a few seconds of thought. A dark streak soon appeared on the side of Gargantua near its equator and quickly turned into a black dot traveling rapidly across the vast expanse of brightly illuminated surface. It didn't take long, however, before Little Red got bored.
*Spot take forever to get to other side! Show me something new!*
"Well, let me show you something you don't see every day," said Richard, pointing to a bright object in the forward starfield. It was the size of a star, but it flickered in a strange way. "Its getting pretty far away now, so we'll need a telescope to see it clearly. James?"
James responded by swinging a telescope out into the dome above them. Instead of trying to teach the eyeless alien how to use an eyepiece, Richard merely displayed on a convenient video monitor the image as seen in the telescope. It looked like a planet with a hole in it.
"That's the ring sail that brought us here," said Richard. "It's made of the same material that the sail of _Prometheus_ is made of. The hole in the ring sail is where _Prometheus_'s sail used to be."
*Sail on _Prometheus_ very big!* said Little Red, impressed for once. *That sail much bigger!*
"It's a thousand kilometers across -- nearly one-third the size of one of the lobes of Rocheworld. When we left the solar system, that ring sail and the _Prometheus_ sail were attached together. The laser around the Sun pushed both sails up to speed -- twenty percent of the speed of light. After forty years of travel, we finally arrived at _your_ star system. As we approached Barnard, the _Prometheus_ sail was detached from the ring sail and turned around so the reflective surface faced the ring sail. The laser beam from the solar system bounced off the ring sail, pushing it ever faster through the Barnard system and out the other side, where you see it now. But the laser light reflecting off the ring sail was focused back onto the _Prometheus_ sail, pushing it in the opposite direction to its travel, and slowing it down. Because of that ring sail we were able to stop here at Barnard and come to visit you."
*And teach me new things.* said Little Red, sober with thought for once. *The word 'visit' means a short stay. When do you go back to Earth?*
There was a long silence as Richard tried to swallow the lump that had suddenly risen into his throat.
"Our expedition was designed to be a one-way mission that would keep us busy exploring for our entire lifetime," he answered. "We will never return to Earth."
*Good!* said Little Red. *You stay and be my friend forever!*
"Sure," said Richard, putting a massive muscled arm around the large alien and giving the squashy body a hug. "Friends forever..." Although Little Red knew the facts about their comparative lifetimes, the red flouwen didn't really appreciate yet what those differences meant. To the nearly indestructible young alien, who was already hundreds of years old -- and could expect to live many thousands of years -- "forever" was just a very long time. To Richard, however, who was nearly 50 years old, "forever" was another 40 years of life at best -- probably a lot less...
*Why is there water in your eyes!?!*
"Never mind. Let's go pump you back into your tank."
As Richard was watching Little Red being squirted out of the hose back into the habitat tank, he noticed that Little Purple was stirring from its rock-like form in the corner.
#I have calculated mathematical logic of relative motion,# Little Purple announced. #It results in very interesting mathematics. Not intuitive at all. If speed of light is same for all observers as the humans say is true, then things must shrink in their direction of motion, moving masses are heavier than stationary masses, and time moves more slowly for moving observers.#
^I agree. Not intuitive at all,^ said Little White. ^Yet, if you say it is logical, it must be. I must taste that.^
*I taste too!* demanded Little Red, extending a flame-red pseudopod.
Little Purple concentrated some memory juices into the end of a pseudopod and passed the knowledge on to its two compatriots. The memory juices contained complex chemicals that coded the logical arguments and mathematical equations that Little Purple had recently developed during its latest session of serious thinking.
^Very interesting taste -- very logical -- definitely not intuitive...^ mused Little White, mulling over the multitude of ideas derivable from the mathematical formulas contained in the succinct chemical patterns that had been passed from purple brain to white brain.
*Wow!* exclaimed Little Red. *Terrific taste!* Amazingly enough, the very active, very vocal impetuous alien was suddenly silent and still -- obviously thinking at great speed. Suddenly the Little Red burst into a series of shrieks and turned himself inside out in exultation at his discovery.
*E=mc^2!!!*
There was a short silence on the flouwen side of the window as Little White and Little Purple thought through what Little Red had uttered.
#Yes!# exclaimed Little Purple. #I missed that consequence of the equations. I must be getting too old. My memory is so full of facts that I don't have any brain left to think with.#
*You two are too old! You have to be young and big and smart to think fast like me!* bragged Little Red.
There was a shocked silence on the human side of the window.
"James! Did he really say Eee equals em cee squared?!?" exclaimed Richard.
The calm deep voice of James spoke confidentially through their individual imps. "The phrase actually spoken in flouwenese, when literally translated, would have been roughly 'A quantity of mass can logically be converted to a quantity of energy with the conversion factor being two multiplies of the speed of light; and vice versa'. I think that, on the whole, I translated the technical content quite accurately and succinctly." There was a trace of a superior tone in James's voice pattern.
It was time for a shift change. Soon the corridor outside the habitat tank was empty and the three flouwen were left alone for a while. With no humans around needing a translation, James bypassed the translation program, and just kept a record of the flouwen's conversation in flouwenese.
*I have something to show you, Subset of Clear^White^Whistle. Come over to the Talking@Plate and I will have James@Server show you the Look@View the Stiff@Mover Richard showed to me.* The red blob swam to the taste-screen on the habitat wall, and forming a red pseudopod, expertly manipulated the icons until a picture of Gargantua and its moons appeared on the screen.
*After you have tasted the Talking@Plate, Subset of Clear^White^Whistle, look it too, to see the different colors of the different moons.* The white creature spread itself against the screen to taste, see, and look at the enlarged image there.
^In my many years of observing Warm and its Pets from the oceans of Water, I have never observed such detail!^
*You will soon observe even more detail, for Big@Circle will soon arrive at Warm! Then we can all leave this small tank and explore!*
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*CHAPTER 02 -- SURVEYING*
Jinjur showed up early for her shift on the control deck, carrying her drink-ball. She looked around at the quiet but busy scene. George was at the command console having a muttered discussion with the lightsail pilot Tony Roma seated a few consoles away. George, reaching the end of his shift, was looking gray and tired. The crew had all used No-Die, a life-extending drug, on their outward flight from earth, which had slipped them through 40 years of calendar time while their bodies only aged 10 years. George, the oldest person on the mission, was nearly a century old by the calendar, while biologically, his age was only 66 years. Jinjur whispered something to her imp, which was formed into an illuminated comb stuck into her military-regulation afro just above her left ear, while continuing to watch the two men.
Tony, in contrast to George, hadn't seemed to age a bit, and looked just as Jinjur remembered him when he had been the best lightsail pilot in her Space Marines Interceptor Fleet -- small, dark, and handsome, with a neat mustache and wavy dark hair that now produced a curl on his forehead. His uniform was as crisp as when he began this shift, and his cheerful enthusiasm for the mission never slackened. From long experience, Jinjur could tell the two men were talking together, since their consoles each contained the same image, and as Tony touched his screen, a green dot would show up on George's.
Although the two men were not more than two meters apart, they didn't raise their voices to speak directly to each other, but used their imp link through James. It was partially to keep the noise level on the control deck down, but mostly it was force of habit.
Linda Regan was at the space science console, zeroing in one of the many telescopes on _Prometheus_ on a large facula which she and James were monitoring on the surface of Barnard. Jinjur could feel a "clunk" through the deck floor as a port opened under the circular science rack in the center of the deck, and a deep-ultraviolet spectrometer was thrust out into the vacuum to collect data.
Next to Linda, at the planetary science console, the tall, gray, lanky figure of Sam Houston hunched over the screen, looking at one image after another which James wanted him to check. The robotic explorers on each of the many moons of Gargantua sent back many images a second. Most of those James took care of automatically, numbering, cataloging, and storing the image as sent, and then using a processed and rectified version of the image to update and perfect its global image map of that moon. Occasionally, however, the image would contain some object that was not easy to categorize. The image would be sent to a human, in this case Sam, with the unknown object circled. Most of these were false alarms, especially on the more barren planets. But there were enough interesting discoveries found on some of the moons, such as Earth-like Zuni which had a multitude of plants and a few small animals, and especially Ganymede-like Zulu, which had some really strange lifeforms, that the job of working the planetary science console was usually interesting. Right now, however, the results of the survey seemed to be boring. Jinjur could hear Sam muttering, "Nope. Nope. Nope." Jinjur suspected that the images were coming from Mars-like Zapotec, which seemed to be barren, not only of life, but even fossils.
On the other side of the deck, Caroline Tanaka was monitoring the display on the communications console. The task was almost automatic, since James had charge of keeping the laser communicators pointed back in the right direction to the solar system, and keeping the multitude of outgoing channels full of the scientific data which was pouring into the ship from the exploration robots scattered all over the Barnard system. Occasionally, however, one of the robots exploring the many moons of Gargantua required a decision -- such as what to explore next -- the answer to which was not immediately obvious to James. On those occasions, the whims of a human, driven by inquisitiveness and intuition rather than pure logical extrapolation, were required.
Nine moons Gargantua kept in their steady orbits; Caroline had mapped them before leaving Earth, using an orbiting laser-controlled phase-locked interferometer array which she had designed and operated. She had also assisted in the naming of the moons, with names the Astronomical Nomenclature Board had decided should all begin with the letter Z. Before they started, they knew that they would find the large moons; Zapotec, Zouave, Zuni, and Zulu, and the five asteroid-sized rocks; Zeus, Zen, Zion, and the Zwingli-Zoroaster pair that shared the same orbit. Upon arrival at the Barnard star system, neither she nor the others were too surprised to discover many smaller moonlets in existence. These were supposed to be given Z-numbers in order of discovery, but the more creative among the crew were not content with that, and one particularly tiny close-in moonlet continued to orbit rapidly onward, uncaring that its name was now Zipcode.
George finally noticed that Jinjur had arrived. He rose, Velcro patches on his back and bottom making a ripping sound as he pulled himself free from his seat. Kicking off from his console, he floated off across the control deck in an arc that brought him to a halt near her, arriving just after the galley imp had delivered a second drink-ball. Jinjur was looking out one of the four portholes at the stars slowly rotating by. A good portion of the upper part of the view out the porthole was blocked by the vast expanse of lightsail overhead. Just below the sail, however, was a large half-moon. Jinjur handed George the second drink-ball. As George took the squeezer, he noticed that it was cold on the outside and clanked on the inside.
"You looked frazzled, so I had James make you a refreshing martini to help you relax at the end of your shift." She held up her own drink-ball.
"Coffee," she said, unnecessarily.
George took a welcome sip of his squeezer. "We've crossed the orbit of Zapotec at 1650 megameters," he reported. "I have been assuming that we weren't going to spend one of our last two landers there, so I didn't have Tony plot a course to match orbits with it. I guess it's about time we made a decision as to which moons we are going to use our last two landers on -- and which one we do first."
"Off-hand, I'd agree with your assessment of Zapotec, but first, let's go through the data summaries to date on all the moons, to make sure we make the right choices," Jinjur replied. "Remember, we don't need to land on a moon to learn about it. We can collect almost as much data from orbit using our imagers and sensors, and a few well chosen robot explorers."
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