"Fred Hoyle & John Elliot - A For Andromeda" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoyle Fred)

visited a good many service establishments and served as security officer in a number of them, from Fylingdales to Christmas
Island. Whelan, she knew, had met her on a rocket range in Australia. She had worked with Harries on a tour of duty at Malvern.
She did not think of herself as a spy, and the idea of informing on her own colleagues struck her as an unpleasant business; but
the Home Office had asked for her, or at least for someone, to be transferred from the Ministry of Defence security section to the
Ministry of Science, and an assignment was an assignment. Before, the people she worked with had always known what she was,
and she had thought of her duty as protecting them. This time they themselves were suspect and she was to be palmed off on
them as a public relations stooge who could nose around and ask questions without putting them on their guard. Reinhart knew,
and disliked it. She disliked it herself. But a job was a job and this-she was told-was important.
She could act the part without difficulty: she looked so honest, so forthright, so much a team member. She had only to sit
back and listen and learn. It was the people she met who discomforted her; they had their own world and their own values. Who
was she to judge them or be party to their judging? When Harries nodded and sauntered away to do what was needed, she
despised both him and herself.
The Professor left soon afterwards and handed her over to John Fleming.
"Perhaps you'd drop her at the Lion when you go back to Bouldershaw. She's staying there."
They went out on to the steps to see the old man off.
"He is rather sweet," said Judy.
Fleming grunted. "Tough as old nails."
He took a hip-flask from his pocket and drank out of it. Then he handed it to her. When she refused he took another swig
himself, and she watched him standing in the light of the porch, his head thrown back, his Adam's apple working up and down as
he gulped. There was something desperately keyed-up about him; perhaps, as Reinhart had said, they had run him ragged. But
there was something else besides-a feeling of a dynamo permanently charging inside him.
"Play bowls?" He seemed to have forgotten his earlier indifference to her. Perhaps the drink. "There's an alley down at
Bouldershaw. Come and join our rustic sports."
She hesitated.
"Oh come along now! I'm not going to leave you at the mercy of these mad astronomers."
"Aren't you an astronomer?"
"Do you mind! Cryogenics, computers, that's really my stuff. Not this airy-fairy nonsense."
They walked across to the small concrete apron where his car was parked. A red beacon light shone on top of the telescope,
and in the dark sky behind it stars began to show. Some could be seen through the tall arches of the pylons, as though they had
already been netted by man. When they reached the car, Fleming looked back and up.
"I've an idea," he said, and his voice was quieter, quite gentle and no longer aggressive. "I've an idea we've got to the
breakaway stage in the physical sciences."
He started to unclip the tonneau cover from his car, a small open sports, while she moved round to the other side.
"Let me help you."
He hardly seemed to notice.
"Some moment, somewhere along the perimeter of our knowledge, we're going to go-wham!-clean through. Right out into
new territory. And it might be here, on this stuff." He bundled the tonneau cover in behind the seat. " 'Philosophy is written in
that vast book which stands forever open before our eyes, I mean the universe.' Who wrote that?"
"Churchill?"
"Churchill!" He laughed. "Galileo! 'It is written in mathematical language.' That's what Galileo said. Any good for a press
handout?"
She looked at him, uncertain how to take it. He opened the door for her.
"Let's go."
The road dropped down to Lancashire on one side and into Yorkshire on the other. On the Yorkshire side it ran down a long


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valley, where every few miles a tall old brick mill stood over the river, until they came to the town of Bouldershaw. Fleming
drove too fast, and grumbled.
"They get on my wick ... Flogging Ministers' Opening! ... The old Prof. sweating on the Honours List; the Ministry bunch all