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

a spacious and opulently furnished room with one wall completely of glass, looking down over the
lesser skyscrapers of the city and the ant colony of the pedestrian precincts far below. The wall
opposite Caldwell's huge curved desk, which faced inward from a corner by the window, was composed
almost totally of a battery of display screens that gave the place more the appearance of a
control room than of an office. The remaining walls carried a display of color pictures showing
some of the more spectacular UNSA projects of recent years, including a seven-mile-long photon-
drive star probe being designed in California and an electromagnetic catapult being constructed
across twenty miles of Tranquilitatis to hurl lunar-manufactured structural components into orbit
for spacecraft assembly.
Caidwell was behind his desk and two other people were sitting with Lyn at the table set
at a T to the desk's front edge when a secretary ushered Hunt in from the outer office. One of
them was a woman in her mid- to late forties, wearing a high-necked navy dress that hinted of a
firm and well-preserved figure, and over it a wide-collared jacket of white-and-navy check. Her
hair was a carefully styled frozen sea of auburn that stopped short of her shoulders, and the
lines of her face, which was not unattractive in a natural kind of way beneath her sparse makeup,
were clear and assertive. She was sitting erect and seemed composed and fully in command of
herself. Hunt had the feeling that he had seen her somewhere before.
Her companion, a man, was smartly attired in a charcoal threepiece suit with a white shirt
and two-tone gray tie. He had a fresh,
clean-shaven look about him and jet-black hair cut short and brushed flat in college-boy
fashion, although Hunt put him at not far off his own age. His eyes, dark and constantly mobile,
gave the impression of serving an alert and quick-thinking mind.
Lyn flashed Hunt a quick smile from the side of the table opposite the two visitors. She
had changed into a crisp two-piece edged with pale orange and was wearing her hair high. She
looked distinctly un -- "groped."
"Vie," Caldwell announced in his gravelly bass-baritone voice, "I'd like you to meet Karen
Heller from the State Department in Washington, and Norman Pacey, who's a presidential advisor on
foreign relations." He made a resigned gesture in Hunt's direction. "This is Dr. Vie Hunt. We send
him to Jupiter to look into a few relics of some extinct aliens, and he comes back with a shipful
of live ones."
They exchanged formalities. Both visitors knew about Hunt's exploits, which had been well
publicized. In fact Vie had met Karen Heller once very briefly at a reception given for some
Ganymeans in Zurich about six months earlier. Of course! Hadn't she been the U.S. Ambassador to-
France, wasn't it, at the time? Yes. She was representing the U.S. at the UN now, though. Norman
Pacey had met some Ganymeans too, it turned out-in Washington
-- but Hunt hadn't been present on that occasion.
Hunt took the empty chair at the end of the table, facing along the length of it toward
Caldwell's desk, and watched the head of wiry, gray, crose-cropped hair while Caldwell frowned
down at his hands for a few seconds and drummed the top of his desk with his fingers. Then he
raised his craggy, heavily browed face to look directly at Hunt, who knew better than to expect
much in the way of preliminaries. "Something's happened that I wanted to tell you about earlier
but couldn't," Caldwell said. "Signals from the Giants' Star started coming in again about three
weeks ago."
Even though he should have known about such a development if anyone did, Hunt was too
taken aback for the moment to wonder about it. As months passed after the sole reply to the first
message transmitted from Giordano Bruno at the time of the S/iapieron's departure, he had grown
increasingly suspicious that the whole thing had been a hoax-that somebody with access to the UNSA
communications net had somehow arranged a message to be relayed back from some piece of UNSA
hardware located out
in space in the right direction. He was open-minded enough to admit that with an advanced