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

small miracle of its own. Hunt drew a long breath, held it for a few seconds, then exhaled it
slowly but still shakily.
"Cigarette?" Lyn inquired. Hunt nodded without thinking. A cigarette, already lit,
appeared between his fingers. Don't even ask about it, he told himself.
It all had to be some kind of an elaborate hallucination. How, when, why, or where he
didn't know, but it seemed that he had little choice for the moment but to go along with it.
Perhaps this whole preliminary interlude had been staged by the Thuriens to provide a period of
adjustment and famfflarization or something like that. If so, he could see their point. This was
like dumping an alchemist from the Middle Ages into the middle of a computerized chemical plant.
Thurien, or wherever this was, was going to take some getting used to, he realized. Having decided
that much, he felt that probably he was over the biggest hurdle already. But how had Lyn managed
to adapt so quickly? Maybe there were disadvantages to being a scientist that he hadn't thought
about before.
When he looked up and studied her face, he could see now that her superficial calm was
being forced in order to control an underlying bemusement not far short of his own. Her mind was
temporarily blocking itself off from the full impact of what it all meant, probably in a way
similar to the delayed shock that was a common reaction to exceptionally painfui news such as the
death of a close relative. He could detect no sign of her having been through anything as
traumatic as he had. At least that was something to be thankful for.
He moved over to one of the chairs and turned to perch himself on an arm. "So...how did
you get here?" he asked.
"Well, I was right behind you on the gravity conveyor, or whatever you'd call it, from
that crazy place that we all walked out into from the plane, and then..." She broke off as she
caught the
perplexed expression creeping across Hunt's face. "You don't know what I'm talking about,
do you?"
He shook his head. "What gravity conveyor?"
Lyn frowned at him uncertainly. "We all walked out of the plane?...There was this big
bright place with everything upside down and sideways?...Something like whatever lifted us up the
stairs picked us all up and took us off along one of the tubes-a big yellow-and-white one?..." She


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was listing the items slowly and intoning them as questions, all the while watching his face
intently as if trying to help him identify the point at which he had lost the thread, but it was
obvious already that she had experienced something quite different right from the beginning.
He waved a hand in front of his face. "Okay, skip the details. How did you get separated
from the others?"
Lyn started to reply and then stopped suddenly and frowned, as if realizing for the first
time that her own recollections were by no means as complete as she had thought. "I'm not sure..."
She hesitated. "Somehow I ended up...I don't know where it was...There was this big organization
chart-colored boxes with names in them, and lines of who reports to who-that had to do with some
crazy kind of United States Space Force." Her face grew more confused as she replayed the memory
in her mind. "There were lots of UNSA names on it that I knew, but with ranks and things that
didn't make any sense. Gregg's name was there as a general, and mine was right underneath as a
major." She shook her head in a way that told Hunt not to bother asking her to explain it.
Hunt remembered the transcripts he had read of the Thurien messages received at Farside,
which had been baffling in their suggestion of a militarized Earth divided in an East-West lineup