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

grew to an iridescent flower, brighter and brighter with its far edges fading into a
deep violet.
In the close-up optics, the impactor began to move across the field of view.
Faster and faster it went. The view zoomed back.
It was bright enough now that David risked a look at Campbell and the ring of
beam projectors around it. Only a few of them were active at this early stage, he
knew, but already the power was a million times that used to launch a starship. And
it would grow by many orders of magnitude over the next nine months. By that time,
he would be deeply into analyzing the results of the planetoid’s impending impact on
Martin.
 He felt Liz’s arms around him and smiled. Time enough for work later. Her
face was glowing—he kissed her. Cyan Mutori glanced at them and looked away.
They watched for an hour or so, until the violet flower had faded into the
interstellar depths. Then their shuttle turned back for Minot.
Once home, David put his full energies into his own projects. To the victors
went the spoils, David thought. His work, which he’d worried about losing
altogether, was now getting high priority; such was his reward for backing the
winners.
An urgent message awaited him—results from his Prospector Probes deep in
the icy mantle of Martin. They’d struck water. No question about it; 11.36 kilometers
under the ice surface was a huge lake, filling the bed of an ancient caldera. No, he
thought, not all that ancient. Martin must not be completely stone cold. There was
some tidal stress from its eccentric orbit, and its radioactive ores still put out a fair
amount of heat. It had to get out somewhere, and the readings pointed to several
vents across the bottom of the lake. There could be life down there, he thought.
It hit him in the gut. Oh, God! If Martin had water and heat, then ... his
imagination ran wild.
Far from being the agent of a temporary rebirth of this planet, the impending
collision might mean the destruction of one of the perhaps six independently evolved
biologies known.
****
Liz stared up at the sky in her dome with restless anticipation. She touched the
net to check the countdown ... 1205013 seconds ... about two standard weeks ... the
particle projectors would finish their job—and hers. Then what?
A beep on her comm sounded. A message from David in his new lab.
“Liz, come over, please. I need your help!”
She found him staring at a micrograph of a rock sample brought up from a
deep borehole on the planetoid falling toward Martin. He hadn’t noticed her coming
in, but instead continued to stare at the dark rock. She found herself staring at it, too.
Liz saw a number of what looked like tiny microbes, squirming around.
“From the planetoid?” she asked.
“Liz?” They kissed cheek to cheek, not on the mouth, Liz noted. He was all
business.
“The center of the planetoid is now above the melting point of water. It would
be boiling in a near vacuum; but here and there, the vapor can’t get out fast enough,
and the pressure rises to the point where liquid water exists. They thaw out once
every hundred and eighty-three thousand years, and they’re thriving, for the last
time.”
“In the wild anyway. What are they?” she asked.
“Archeae. Almost eighty percent identical to those in the Solar System and