"Paul Preuss - The Gates of Heaven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preuss Paul)

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THE GATES
OF HEAVEN
Paul Preuss
Scanned By 3S
Proofed By MadMaxAU

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 I
ACTIS
 1
Lights come and go in the night sky. Men, troubled at last by the things
they build, may toss in their sleep and dream bad dreams, or lie awake while the
meteors whisper greenly overhead. But nowhere in all space or on a thousand
worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. There may be wisdom; there
may be power; somewhere across space great instruments, handled by strange,
manipulative organs, may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners
yearn-ing as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the principles of
evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be
none forever.
—Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey


Lynn Nishihara inserted her I.D. card in the automat slot, popped a Thermo-Pak of
tea from the dispenser, and walked past dozens of empty tables toward the doors of
the brightly lit cafeteria. The place was as deserted as Sunday night could make it.

She stopped outside the entrance long enough to zip up her windbreaker. The desert
night was cold. For a moment she considered getting back into the electric tram
which had brought her from the BOQ. Instead, she decided to leave it at curbside
and walk the half kilometer to the Operations Building. It was easier to think,
walking. She was mentally composing the opening paragraphs of the report she
planned to submit as her final official act upon resigning from Project Cyclops.

The wind was rising again after the evening calm. A flirtatious breeze distracted her
attention by rolling a comical fat tumbleweed across her path, then stole a sandy
kiss. She grimaced; two years of life in the desert had not reconciled her to the dust
that crept into everything: eyes, nose, ears, hair, clothes.

But in six weeks she would be back in Boston. It seemed an eternity to wait.

Her eyes followed the tumbleweed, now a hundred meters off, as it bounced along
the sand and then abruptly tangled itself in a pile of others at the base of the nearest
antenna. At night the antenna seemed to loom even larger than it really was, its round
central tower and steel armature rising over ten stories to support a mesh paraboloid
as wide as a football field. As Nishihara glanced up, the dish obliterated a third of the
starry night sky. She became aware of the constant whine that laid a substrate of
sound for her every waking and dreaming thought: the sound of the tracking motors
which locked the great antennas to the rotation of the celestial sphere.
Like ancient menhirs standing in precise rows, the antennas stretched away to the