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

"Yes. It's to go to one of the engineers at Pithead. I can't explain now, but the matter
is urgent. If you don't waste any time, you should be able to make the nine o'clock shuttle down
to Main. I'll have it sealed and waiting by the time you get here. Treat this as grade X-ray."
The adjutant's face at once became serious. "I'll be there right away," he said, and the
screen went blank.

Shannon received a brief call from Pithead shortly before lunch, advising that Carizan was
on his way up to Jupiter Five via Ganyniede Main Base. When Carizan arrived, he brought with him a
printout of a ifie of data, supposedly relating to tests performed on the Ganymean beacon, that
had materialized in the computers at Pithead that very morning after coming in from Earth over the
link and being relayed down to the surface. The engineers at Pithead had been puzzled because the
ifie header was out of sequence
and contained references that didn't match the database indexing system. And nobody had
known anything about any tests being scheduled of the kind that the header mentioned.
As Shannon had anticipated, the file contained just numbers- many groups of numbers, each
group consisting of a long list of pairs; it was typical of the layout of an experimental report
giving readings of interrelated variables and would have meant nothing more to anybody who had no
reason not to accept it at face value. Shannon called together a small team of specialists whose
discretion could be trusted, and it didn't take them long to deduce that each group of pairs
formed a set of datapoints defined by x-y coordinates in a 256-by-256 matrix array; the hint had
been there in the crossword. When the sets of points were plotted on a computer display screen,
each set formed a pattern of dots that looked just like a statistical scattering of test data
about a straight-line function. But when the patterns of dots were superposed they formed lines of
words written diagonally across the screen, and the words formed a message in English. The message
contained pointers to other ifies of numbers that had also been beamed through from Earth and gave
explicit instructions for decoding them, and when this was done the amount of information that
they yielded turned out to be prodigious.
The result was a set of detailed directions for Jupiter Five to transmit a long sequence
of Ganymean communications coding groups not into the UNSA net but outward, toward coordinates
that lay beyond the edge of the solar system. The contents of any replies received from that
direction were, the directions said, to be disguised as experimental data in the way that had thus
been established and communicated to Navcomms via the laser link.
Shannon was weary and red-eyed due to lack of sleep by the time he sat down at the
terminal in his stateroom and composed a message for transmission to Earth, addressed to Dr.
Victor Hunt at Navcomms Headquarters, Houston. It read:

Vic,
I've talked to Vince Carizan, and it's all a lot clearer now. We're running some
tests on it as you asked, and if anything positive shows up I'll have the results sent straight
through.


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Best wishes,
Joe


Chapter Five