"James P. Hogan - Giants 3 - Giant's Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

easily set up another long-range communications facility in Siberia, up in orbit, out near Luna
maybe, and operate their own link to whatever was intercepting Farside's signals out beyond the
edge of the solar system. Any reply coming back would probably be in the form of a fairly wide
beam by the time it got to Earth, which meant that anybody could receive it and know that somebody
somewhere other than the UN was cheating. But if the replies were in a prearranged code, nobody
would be able to interpret them or know for whom they were in-tended. The Soviets might be
accused, in which case they would deny the charge vehemently...and that would be about as much as
anybody would be able to do about it.


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He thought he could see now why he had been brought in on all this. Heller had given
herself away earlier when she said that the U.S. had been trying to play it straight, "so far." As
insurance the State Department had decided that it needed its own private line too, but nothing
crude enough to be detected anywhere within a few hundred thousand miles of Earth. So who would
they have sent Heller and Pacey to talk to? Who else but someone who knew a lot about Ganymeans
and Ganymean technology, some
body who had also been among the first people to receive them on Ganymede?
And that was another point-Hunt had spent a lot of time on Ganyniede, and he still had
many close friends among the UNSA personnel there with the Jupiter Four and Jupiter Five missions.
Jupiter was a long, long way from the vicinity of Earth, which meant that no receivers anywhere
near Earth would ever know anything about a beam aimed toward Jupiter from the fringe of the solar
system, whether the beam diverged appreciably or not. And, of course, the J4 and J5 command ships
were linked permanently to Earth by laser channels...which Caidwell and Naycomms just happened to
control. It couldn't possibly be all just a coincidence, he decided.
Hunt looked up at Caldwell, held his eye for a second, then turned his head to gaze at the
two people from Washington. "You want to set up a private wire to Gistar via Jupiter to arrange a
landing here, without any more messing around, before the Soviets get around to doing something,"
he told them. "And you want to know if I can come up with an idea for telling the people at
Jupiter what we want them to do, without the risk of any Thuriens who might be bugging the laser
link finding out about it. Is that right?" He turned his eyes back toward Caidwell and inclined
his head. "What do I get, Gregg?"
Heller and Pacey exchanged glances that said they were impressed.
"Ten out of ten," Caldwell told him.
"Nine," Heller said. Hunt looked at her curiously. There was a hint of laughter in her
expression. "If you can come up with something, we'll need all the help we can get handling
whatever comes afterward," she explained. "The UN might have decided to try going it alone without
their Ganymean experts, but the U.S. hasn't."
"In other words, welcome to the team," Norman Pacey completed.


Chapter Four

Joseph B. Shannon, Mission Director of Jupiter Five, orbiting two thousand miles above the
surface of Ganymede, stood in an instrumentation bay near one end of the mile-and-a-quarter-long
ship's command center. He was watching a large mural display screen from behind a knot of
spellbound ship's officers and UNSA scientists. The screen showed an undulating landscape of
oranges, yellows, and browns as it lay cringing beneath a black sky made hazy by a steady