"Joe Haldeman - The Coming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

of the satellite appeared, silhouetted against the sun peeking crimson from behind the curve of the Earth.
Dan pointed at it and the big camera, which had been tight on Bell, turned around and got a shot of the
wallscreen.
"That's pretty but falsado," she said. "GRB-1 's up in geosynchronous orbit; the Earth's just a big ball
that gets in the way."
"So what's this anomaly? I mean, what does the word mean?"
"It means something unexpected, a mystery. In this case, we recorded the gamma ray burst, but
when the computer tried to find out what source it was, there was no object there, in previous records. I
mean down to twenty-fifth magnitude, which is about as faint as they get.
"That was the first anomaly, which was interesting. The second was startling. Whenever we get a
burst that's more than a few seconds long, we send out a request to the Japanese gamma-ray
observatory on the Moon, for backup data. Their detector's more powerful. It found the burst but said
that our position was a tiny hair off. We checked and no, our position was accurate. What it was, was
parallax."
She anticipated the question. "You hold your finger up at arm's length, and look at it first with your
right eye; then with your left." She demonstrated, blinking. "The finger appears to change position with
respect to things farther away. That's parallax.
"Stars, let alone galaxies, are too far away for there to be a measurable parallax between the Moon
and GRB-1, the right eye and the left. This thing was only about a tenth of a light-year away. It's not a
star."
"So what is it?"
"That's the third anomaly, the fantastic one. I went to analyze the spectrum of ... I went to analyze
the signal. It was a long steady beep for sixty seconds, and then a jumble for sixty seconds, and then
another steady beep, and then an identical jumble." She paused. "Do you know what that means?"
"You tell me," he said quietly.
"It means the signal isn't natural. The sixty-second minute is not an interval that occurs in nature."
"Yet it was coming from somewhere farther than humans have ever been?"
"That's right. And it's obviously a signal. I put it through a decryptation, what we call a Drake
program. It's simple frequency modulation, like FM radio. This is the message." She pushed the button
and said, "Previous previous."
Dan pointed at the screen and the camera obeyed. "They're coming?"
"Yes, initially at almost the speed of light. At the rate they're slowing down—fifty gees'
deceleration!—they'll be here in exactly three months. That's New Year's Day."
He was silent for a moment. "Suppose it's a hoax. Could it be a fake, a joke?"
"Well, somebody could get to my computer, verdad, and set me up for a practical joke. But they
couldn't get to the Moon. I mean, I just told them where to look, and there it was."
"So something's out there." Dan laughed nervously. "An invasion from outer space."
"We'd better hope it's not an invasion. You extrapolate back from the first signal, and when that
thing first appeared it was going point-nine-nine-nine ... fifteen or sixteen nines ... of the speed of light."
She leaned toward the little camera and spoke carefully. "If you took all of the energy that all of the world
produces in one year, and put it all into a space drive ... we couldn't make a golf ball go that fast. If it's an
invasion, we've had it. Perdido."
"Dios," Dan said under his breath. "Use your phone?" He reached past her and picked up the wand;
checked his watch while he was punching. "Charlene, listen up. Dan. You have to cut me a
fifteen-second teaser on the seven o'clock. Then a three-minute lead at eight, and a five-minute lead at
nine. And get ... listen, it's my ass, not yours. And get Harry and Rebecca down here right now for
depth and color, for nine."
He listened. "Just tell Julie to be down in Room Six in fifteen minutes. I'm gonna show him two
crystals that'll blow him into the next county. The next century. We're gonna scoop the whole fucking
world."