"Robert A. Metzger - Cusp" - читать интересную книгу автора (Metzger Robert)

It was not.

Flares curled and twisted, contorted by the Sun’s magnetic fields. What he saw was a flame of
geometrical perfection: a slender triangle of burning plasma cutting across the sky, edges too straight to
be a superflare.

Pulling his eye back, he let the scope suck down a few more terabits, as he dropped the filtering in his
Ocs and straightened up, looking west. The Sun was now partially hidden behind the distant peak, but
the wedge of flame blowing from it was still all too visible. He had gathered data for more than six hours,
melding feeds from Geo and Lunar observers, and even one from Mars; but had sampled those quickly,
taking just a few frames. He knew those sites would be carefully monitored.

He did not want someone following the trail of bits back to this mountainside.

While he knew he should be perfectly shielded from observation by the Swirl, he could not put his faith in
anything that blocked his departure from the campsite to search for his family. The image of the Swirl
hung in the distance: the rainbow jewel slowly turning, light reflecting from each of its facets. It appeared
to sit in the forked trunk of a dead Ponderosa pine.

“My family!” he shouted at it.

The Swirl didn’t move, didn’t show any reaction; he turned his back to it.

He knew that he’d gathered more than enough data to run the simulation but didn’t really want to see the
result. Suspecting the truth, he did not want it confirmed. He stood motionless, for just a few more
seconds, listening to crickets chirp and the distant gurgle of a stream. As long as he didn’t look at the
simulation, there might still be a chance.

The Earth might still have a future.

For a moment he considered simply not looking at all and glanced out at the horizon. The Sun had set;
but the tail end of the plasma jet still jutted up over the mountain, forestalling the dusk. No choice.

“Composite image,” he whispered.

The air in front of him shifted, distorting everything beyond it, as an image began to coalesce: a burning
orb, the Sun in miniature. The image of the Sun morphed into the real world in the same way that the
image of the Swirl had been morphed into the forest. The burning orb hovered above his camp stove: a
ball of plasma spitting flares, pockmarked with darkened sunspots, its surface a mottled and writhing
expanse of churning gases.

A jet of plasma exploded out of the miniature Sun’s side, shaped like a perfect cone; the plume
disappeared behind the trunk of a nearby pine tree. He walked toward it and passed his hand through the
phantom plasma—tentatively at first, as if even the image might have the power to incinerate. Feeling
nothing, he walked through it, suddenly surrounded by the cone of too-white light.

The cone of plasma was hollow.

“Specifics,” he whispered.