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

incandescent drizzle falling from somewhere above, while in the far distance half the skyline was
erupting in a boiling column of colors that exploded upward off the top of the picture.
It had been fifty-two years before-the year that Shannon was born-when other scientists at
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena had marveled at the first close-ups of lo to be sent
back by the Voyager I and II probes, and dubbed the extraordinary disk of mottled orange "the
great pizza in the sky." But Shannon had never heard of any pizza being cooked in the way this one
had.
Orbiting through a plasma flux of mean particle energies corresponding to 100,0000 Kelvin
sustained by Jupiter's magnetic field, the satellite acted as an enormous Faraday generator and
supported internal circulating currents of five million amperes with a power dissipation of a
thousand billion watts. And as much energy again was released inside it as heat from tidal
friction, resulting from orbital perturbations induced as Europa and Ganymede lifted lo resonantly
up and down through Jupiter's gravity. This amount of electrically and gravitationally produced
heat maintained large reservoirs of molten sulfur and sulfur compounds below the moon's surface,
which eventually penetrated upward through faults to explode into the virtually zero-pressure of
the outside. The result was a regular succession of spectacular volcanoes of solidifying sulfur
and sulfur-dioxide frost that ejected at
velocities of up to a thousand meters per second, and sometimes reached heights of 300
kilometers or more.
Shannon was looking at a view of one of those volcanoes now, sent back from a probe on b's
surface. It had taken the mission's engineers and scientists more than a year of back-to-the-
drawing-board experiences to devise an instrumentation package and shielding method that would
function reliably under Jupiter's incessant bombardment of radiation, electrons, and ions, and
Shannon had felt an obligation to be present in person to observe the results of their eventual


file:///F|/rah/James%20P.%20Hogan/Hogan,%20James%20P%20-%20Giant's%20Star.txt (11 of 137) [2/4/03 10:56:12 PM]
 file:///F|/rah/James%20P.%20Hogan/Hogan,%20James%20P%20-%20Giant's%20Star.txt

success. Far from being the chore he had expected, the occasion had turned out an exhilaration and
served as a reminder of how easy it was for supreme commanders of anything to allow themselves to
become remote and lose touch with what was happening in the trenches. In future, he thought to
himself, he would make a point of keeping more up to date on the progress of the mission's
scientific projects.
He remained in the command center discussing details of the probe for a full hour after he
was officially off duty, and then at last excused himself and retired to his private quarters.
After a shower and a change of clothes he sat down at the desk in his stateroom and interrogated
the terminal for a listing of the day's mail. One item that had come in was qualified as a text
message from Vie Hunt at Navcomms Headquarters. Shannon was both pleasantly surprised and
intrigued. He had had many interesting talks with Hunt during the latter's stay on Ganymede, and
didn't perceive him as being somebody with much time for idle socializing, which suggested that
something interesting was afoot. Curious, he keyed in a command for Hunt's message to be
displayed. Five minutes later he was still sitting there staring at the message, his brows knitted
in a mystified frown. It read:

Joe,
To avoid any further cross words on this subject, I looked for some clues in the
book you mentioned and came across some references on pages 5, 24, and 10. When you get down to
sections 11 and 20, it all makes more sense.
How they got 786 is still a puzzle.