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

Science had created the tools to solve humanity's problems a century ago, but had stood by
helplessly while others took the tools and forged them into means of attaining other ends. It was
not until the 2010s, when the UN emerged as a truly coherent global influence to be reckoned with,
that strategic disarmament had become fact and the resources of the superpowers were at last
mobilized toward building a safer and better world.
It was all the more tragic and inexplicable that the UN-until so recently the epitome of
the world's commitment to meaningful progress and the realization of the full potential of the
human race
-- should be the obstacle in the road along which the arrow of that progress surely
pointed. It seemed a law of history for successful movements and empires to resist further change
after the needs that had motivated them into promoting change had been satisfied. Perhaps, she
reflected, the UN was already, in keeping with the universally accelerating pace of the times,
beginning to show the eventual senility symptom of all empires-stagnation.
But the planets continued to move in their predicted orbits, and the patterns being
revealed by the computers connected to the instruments at Giordano Bruno didn't change. So was her
"reality" an illusion built on shifting sands, and had scientists shunned the ifiusion for some
vaster, unchanging reality that was the only one of permanence that mattered? Somehow she couldn't
picture the Englishman Hunt or the American she had met in Houston as fugitives who would idle
their lives away tinkering in ivory towers.
A moving point of light detached itself from the canopy of stars and enlarged gradually


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into the shape of the UNSA surface transporter ship due in from Tycho. It came to a halt above the
far side of the base, and after pausing for a few seconds sank slowly out of sight between Optical
Dome 3 and a clutter of storage tanks and laser transceivers. Aboard it would be the courier with
the latest information from Houston via Washington. The experts had decreed that if Ganymean
technology was behind the surveillance of Earth's communications anything was possible, and the
ban on using even supposedly secure channels was still being rigidly enforced. Heller turned away
and walked across the floor of the dome to call an elevator at the rear wall. A minute or two
later she stepped out into a brightly lit, white-walled corridor three levels below the surface
and began walking in the direction of the central hub of Bruno's underground labyrinth.
Mikolai Sobroskin, the Soviet representative on Farside, came out of one of the doors as
she passed and turned to walk with her in the same direction. He was short but broad, completely
bald, and pink-skinned, and he walked with a hurried, jerking gait, even in lunar gravity, that
made her feel for a moment like Snow White. From a dossier that Norman Pacey had procured,
however, she knew that the Russian had been a lieutenant-general in the Red Army, where he had
specialized in electronic warfare and countermeasures, and a counterintelligence expert for many
years after
that. He came from a world about as far removed from Walt Disney's as it was possible to
get.
"I spent three months in the Pacific conducting equipment trials aboard a nuclear carrier
many years ago," Sobroskin remarked. "It seemed that it was impossible to get from anywhere to
anywhere without interminable corridors. I never did find out what lay in between half those
places. This base reminds me of it."
"I'd say the New York subway," Heller replied.
"Ah, but the difference is that these walls get washed more regularly. One of the problems
with capitalism is that only the things that pay get done. So it wears a clean suit which conceals