"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - The Tenth Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

like
little more than a piece of space junk in an area devoid of anything else
man-made. A silver craft, the diameter of a small bedroom, its surface was
cluttered with a myriad of dishes, antennas, and measuring devices, making it
look like a spider. On the side of the craft, in one of the only small, open
areas of the main body, were the letters ISMB fol-lowed by the number 6.
Under
the letters were a dozen tiny stencils of flags, indicating the countries
that
had helped in the joint project.
Out here, everything familiar seemed remote. Even the sun was nothing more
than
a distant hole of light in the massive field of stars, not even strong enough
to
cast real shadows, or supply any real warmth.
Not that ISMB 6 cared. It was one of seven buoys de-signed by American and
Japanese engineers, and sent out-ward by a consortium of twelve countries,
all
believing that the heavens needed to be monitored as the seas were once
monitored. The early scientists saw the ISMB system as a twofold project: the
buoys would act as ways to gather infor-mation in deep space, and they would
also serve as the markers of Earth's boundaries.
Surprisingly, the nations making up the consortium did not want to consider
the
boundary issue. To them, having bounda-ries meant defending them, sending
weapons into space, per-haps even developing a fleet.
Such things are not necessary, the politicians said, unless there is a
perceived
threat. And of course, there was no threat and no hint of one ever appearing.
The politicians believed we were alone. The scientists weren't sure.
So the consortium took its funding and built the seven buoys, launching them
over a three-year period. Three buoys orbited the three largest planets in
the
solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Two buoys were stationed over the
sun's poles, holding positions above and below the plane of the solar system
at
a distance from the sun about the same as Mars. The seventh was completing
the
last year of its flight to catch and orbit Pluto.
All seven sent a constant stream of data Earthward, pow-ered by batteries
designed to last thirty years, even without solar reenergizing. The data was
received at stations all over Earth and relayed to a classroom-sized area
three
floors under a complex outside of Sydney, Australia. The complex housed, at
times, upwards of a hundred scientists from around the world, studying
on-site
the information being sent back from the buoys.
At the complex, ISMB 6 was the only buoy that hadn't been assigned a
nickname.
The nicknames suggested by the English-speaking scientists were too crude to