"Michael McCollum - Thunderstrike" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

“My apartment, 20:00 hours. Dress casual. Margaret will have drinks waiting.”

#

Amber sat at her desk in the lower levels of the administrative section and powered up her terminal. The
screen instantly lit to display her day list. She let her eyes scan down the list with practiced efficiency.
There were the usual reports and summaries to get out, data to correlate, and at the bottom, a private
message from Director Meinz. She keyed for acceptance. It was an official invitation from the director
requesting her attendance at Niels Grayson’s apartment that evening. The message was dated late the
previous day. Its tone betrayed far more anxiety than had Niels’ invitation at breakfast. Amber dictated
a reply and wondered just how serious the fiscal problems of the observatory really were.

As soon as the computer beeped its acceptance, she returned to her review of the day’s activities. She
noted an item three levels up from the director’s message, frowned, and keyed to engage the computer’s
voice circuits.

“Yes, Miss Hastings?” the machine answered promptly.

“What’s this Item Nine on my day list?”

“That is the reference number for the observation you requested fifteen days ago.”

“Refresh my memory.”
“The matter of a comet sighting in Monoceros. You asked that an observation be made by the 60
centimeter instrument as soon as that portion of sky was once again visible.”

“Oh, yes. Put it up on the screen!”

Her workscreen changed to reveal a starfield. She had seen the same field two weeks earlier while
working graveyard shift. She glanced at the region where the comet had been. It was still there.

“Overlay the two images,” she ordered.

The screen seemed to blur for a moment, then refocused as the computer synchronized the two
views. The fixed stars were dimensionless points, but the target object now showed as a pair of tiny
diffuse clouds.”

“Engage blink comparator mode!”

For a moment, nothing happened. Then one image disappeared. It reappeared a second later just as its
twin vanished. Amber sat looking at the screen as the fuzzy dot jumped back and forth at the rate of one
jump each second.

“Is that enough to get an orbital fix?” she asked.

“It is,” the computer responded. “The object is some 1.2 billion kilometers from the sun. Its orbit is a
very long cometary with perihelion somewhere beyond Mars.”

“How long a cometary?” Amber asked.