"Alan Dean Foster - Transformers - Ghosts of Yesterday" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

axis. Those observers not stationed at a distance and not wearing suitable protection hastened to cover
their ears.

"All engines running."

Slowly, with a ponderous grace that was at once a wonder and an impossibility to behold, the entire
enormous cylindrical shape began to move. Rising from the launching pad, slowly picking up speed and
trailing streamers of white, the Saturn moon rocket climbed skyward with an agonizing steadiness that
was a tribute to the thousands of individuals who had worked to make it a reality.

"Liftoff!" The controller was not quite able to contain himself. "We have a liftoff! Thirty-two minutes past
the hour, we have liftoff of Apollo Eleven." Realizing that he had not been cleared to express personal
enthusiasm, the controller restrained himself. "The tower has been cleared."

Outside, man-made thunder sent wading birds in the nearby shallows fleeing in all directions. Bemused
alligators ducked underwater while swamp rodents of various species scrambled frantically for cover.
Within Mission Control, a new voice and a new controller took over.

"Okay, we've gone to roll program."

Still a third voice added with becoming calm, "Neil Armstrong reporting that we are in the roll-and-pitch
program. Apollo Eleven is now on a proper heading, destinationthe moon."


Same year, same day, same time. While the attention of the world was focused on a spit of low, sandy
land on the east coast of humid Florida, something remarkably similar was taking place nearly half a
hemisphere away. Far, far to the north of the Saturn V launching pad. So far to the north that it was
ignored. No one paid any attention to such places. They were the habitat of polar bears and seals,
narwhals and arctic hares, howling gales and blinding blizzards.

Located in the high Arctic on an island so rugged and isolated and difficult to reach that it was shunned
even by itinerant Inuit hunters, something extraordinary was taking place. At first glance it involved a base
and a launching site that would immediately have reminded a startled visitor of the historic event currently
unfolding far to the south in Florida. Closer inspection coupled with a little knowledge of rockets and
astronautics, however, would have indicated that the major components involved were very different
indeed from those located on the Atlantic shore. They looked like nothing that had ever been premiered
in magazines such as Aviation Week or Sky & Telescope or even Analog.

Some of them, in fact, looked downright alien.

The ship currently standing on the single camouflaged launching pad resembled the hulking Saturn V
moon rocket about as much as a child's balsa wood glider resembled a jet fighter. It was sleek and
winged and boasted only a single stage instead of the Saturn's three. Assorted decidedly unaerodynamic
bulges and accoutrements protruding from its sides hinted at a technology that was tens, perhaps
hundreds of years in advance of the best that the Florida facility could send skyward. Even the monitoring
equipment within the single low, snow-covered structure that served as local Mission Control was far in
advance of anything in use at Kennedy.

Identification of any kind was noticeably absent both within the heated confines of the control station and
on the ship itself. Anyone standing outside in the frigid, snow-whipped arctic air might have seen a name