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

Hunt lounged back in the pilot's seat and stared absently down at the toytown suburbs of
Houston while the airmobile purred along contentedly, guided by intermittent streams of binary
being directed up at it from somewhere below. It was interesting, he thought, how the patterns of
movement of the groundcars, flowing, merging, slowing, and accelerating in unison on the roadways
below seemed to reveal some grand, centrally orchestrated design
-- as if they were all parts of an unimaginably complex score composed by a cosmic Bach.
But it was all an illusion. Each vehicle was programmed with only the details of its own
destination plus a few relatively simple instructions for handling conditions along the way; the
complexity emerged as a consequence of large numbers of them interacting freely in their synthetic
environment. It was the same with life, he reflected. All the magical, mystical, and supernatural
forces invoked through the ages to explain it were inventions that existed in the minds of misled
observers, not in the universe they observed. He wondered how much untapped human talent had been
wasted in futile pursuit of the creations of wishful thinking. The Ganymeans had entertained no
such illusions, but had applied themselves diligently to understanding and mastering the universe
as it was, instead of how it seemed to be or how they might have wanted it to be. Maybe that was
why the Ganymeans had reached the stars.
In the seat next to him, Lyn looked up from the half-completed crossword in the
Interplanetary Journal of a few days earlier. "Got any ideas for this-'It sounds like a
lumberjack's musical number.' What do you make of that?"
"How many letters?" Hunt asked after a few moments of thought.
"Nine."
Hunt frowned at the ifight-systems status summaries being routinely updated on the console
display in front of him. "Logarithm," he said after another pause.
Lyn thought about it, then smiled faintly. "Oh, I see sneaky. It sounds like 'logger
rhythm.'"
"Right."
"It fits okay." She wrote the word in on the paper resting on her lap. "I'm glad that Joe
Shannon had fewer problems with it than this."
"You and me both."
Shannon's confirmation that the message was understood had arrived two days earlier. The
idea had occurred to Hunt and Lyn one evening while they were at Lyn's apartment, solving a puzzle
in one of Hunt's books of London Times crosswords. Don Maddson, the linguistics expert at Navcomms
who had studied the Ganymean language, was one of the regular compilers of the Journal puzzles and
also a close friend of Hunt's. So with Caldwell's blessing, Hunt had told Maddson as much as was
necessary about the Gistar situation, and together they had constructed the message transmitted to
Jupiter. Now there was nothing to do but wait and hope that it produced results.
"Let's hope Murphy takes a day off," Lyn said.
"Never hope that. Let's hope somebody remembers Hunt's extension to the Law."
"What's Hunt's extension?"
"Everything that can go wrong, will...unless somebody makes it his business to do
something about it."
The stub wing outside the window dipped as the airmobile banked out of the traffic
corridor and turned to commence a shallow descent. A cluster of large white buildings standing to
attention on a river bank about a mile away moved slowly around until they were centered in the
windshield and lying dead ahead.
"He must have been an insurance salesman," Hunt murmured after a short silence.
"Who?"
"Murphy. 'Everything's going to screw up-sign the application now.' Who else but an
insurance salesman would have thought of saying something like that?"