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

The main receiver dish at Giordano Bruno was like a gigantic Cyclopean eye-a four-hundred-
foot-diameter paraboloid of steel latticework towering into the starry blackness above the
lifeless desolation of lunar Farside. It was supported by twin lattice towers moving in diametric


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opposition around the circular track that formed the most salient surface feature of the
observatory and base. As it stood motionless, listening to whispers from distant galaxies, the
lines of its lengthening shadow lay draped as a distorted mesh across the domes and lesser
constructions huddled around it, spilling over on one side to become indistinct and lost among the
boulders and craters scattered beyond.
Karen Heller stood gazing up at it through the transparent wall of an observation tower
protruding from the roof of the two-story Main Block. She had gone there to be alone and recompose
herself after yet another acrimonious meeting of the eleven-person UN Farside delegation, which
had gotten nowhere. Their latest scare was that the signals might not be coming from Ganymeans at
all, which was her own fault for ill-advisedly introducing the thought that Hunt had voiced when
she was in Houston a week earlier. She wasn't sure even now why she had brought that possibility
up at all, since with hindsight it provided an opportunity for procrastination that they were
bound to latch onto. As she had commented to a surprised Norman Pacey afterward, it had been a
badly calculated attempt at a shock tactic to spur any positive reaction, and had misfired.
Perhaps in her frustration she hadn't been thinking too clearly at the time. Anyway it was done
now, and the latest transmission sent out toward Gistar had discounted the possibility of any
landing in the immediate future and instead talked reams of insignificant detail to do with rank
and protocol. Ironically this in itself should have said clearly enough that the aliens, Ganymean
or not, harbored no hostile intentions; if they did, they would surely have just arrived, if that
was what they wanted to do, without waiting for a cordial invitation. It all made the UN
policy more enigmatic and reinforced her suspicions, and the State Department's, that the
Soviets were setting themselves up to go it alone and were manipulating the UN somehow.
Nevertheless the U.S. would continue to follow the rules until Houston succeeded in establishing a
channel via Jupiter-assuming Houston succeeded. If they did, and if none of the efforts to speed
things up at Bruno had borne fruit by that time, the U.S. would feel justified in concluding that
its hand had been forced.
As she gazed up at the lines of metal etched against the blackness by the rays of the
setting sun, she marveled at the knowledge and ingenuity that had created an oasis of life in a
sterile desert a quarter of a million miles from Earth, and built instruments such as this, which
even as she watched might be silently probing the very edges of the universe. One of the
scientific advisors from NSF had told her once that all of the energy collected by all the world's
radiotelescopes since the beginnings of that branch of astronomy almost a century earlier was
equivalent to no more than that represented by the ash from a cigarette falling through a distance
of several feet. And somehow the whole fantastic picture painted by modern cosmology-of collapsed
stars, black holes, X-ray-emitting binaries, and a universe consisting of a "gas" of galaxy
"molecules" -- had all been reconstructed from the information contained in it.
She had ambivalent views about scientists. On the one hand, their intellectual
accomplishments were baffling, and at times like this awesome; on the other, she often felt that
at a deeper level their retreat into the realm of the inanimate represented an abdication-an
escape from the burdens of the world of human affairs within which the expression of knowledge
acquired meaning. Even biologists seemed to reduce life to terms of molecules and statistics.