"C. Sanford Lowe & G. David Nordley - The Small Pond" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lowe C Sanford)

using voice instead of net was interesting, David mused.
Liz nodded to him. He got up and slipped quietly into the nearby woods.
Cyan Mutori was probably the last person who should know he was actively helping
Liz in her campaign. Gunheim had made it very clear to him that while he recognized,
with a wink, David’s personal relationship to Liz, any public attacks from David
would, in Gunheim’s words, “be a mite disruptive to your research program, mate.”
“Hello, Cyan. Come on in,” Liz said when he was safely out of sight. Her
voice carried clearly in the still evening. “How’s the project going?”
David felt for Liz. Gunheim’s next move, of course, had been to remove Liz
from her remaining role as impactor fabrication specialist.
“I would like David to hear what I have to say,” Cyan said. “I understand the
precautions you take. I am not offended.”
David was startled. Had she seen him? Or did she just reason he would be
here? There was much more to Cyan Mutori than one realized.
“Come on back, David,” Liz said.
He reappeared from the woods.
Cyan nodded to him, with no hint of a smile or a frown. She wore a green
sarong with white flowers and a white orchid in her long, jet-black hair—South
Pacific, squared. She’d even browned her skin somehow; lamps, probably, David
thought. Campbell didn’t put out enough ultraviolet light to make a tan.
“Physically, the project is a little behind schedule, but okay,” Cyan began.
 “Behind?” he asked.
“Deliberate delays, I think. If I counter them completely, I may be removed
because these delays represent the will of someone powerful.” Cyan shut her eyes
for a moment, then opened them. “But if I let them become too great, the project will
be in jeopardy, and I will be the scapegoat. It is a very delicate situation.”
David shook his head. “You are risking a lot. Look, as I understand it, the
worst thing that can happen is that if we don’t launch, the other impactors get
diverted, and thirty years later we all try again. It’s not worth a whole lot of suffering.
Pun not intended.”
Liz shook her head. “David, I don’t know that human politics will allow
another chance. The project takes too much discipline and it’s too visible. Every one
of the launch sites has to be able to push the project through at the same time,
without any more coordination than a quarter-century round trip communications
delay. We have to do it here if we possibly can.”
“Liz, you’re fixated,” David countered.
Cyan shook her head. “Liz, David. Gunheim is not trying to stop the project.
He has, I think, something worse in mind, and that is why I am here.”
Liz turned to her and stared. “What could be worse?”
“He came to me yesterday with a question. ‘Now,’ he asks, ‘if one impactor
hits a little less hard than the other three impactors, there would be a little momentum
bias in the final product, wouldn’t there be?’” Mutori shook her head. “He does not
understand several things.”
Liz said nothing, but stared at Mutori, shock all over her face.
“What?” David said, uncertainly. “He has done simulations, of course.”
Liz looked at him, whitefaced. “You can’t just ‘do’ simulations. You have to
know when approximations are good enough and when you need another couple of
days of number crunching. And,” she paused, “there is still too much we don’t
know about how matter behaves at such energies and densities. It’s hard enough to
do a symmetrical zero-biased simulation. Chaos only can tell what would happen if