"George Zebrowski - Stranger Suns" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zebrowski George)

He switched to a view of the shuttle pulling away from the dump sphere. As the orbiter dwindled, he
found himself almost sympathizing with the ridicule that had been hurled against the tachyon project.
Trying to eavesdrop on alien civilizations in the hope of picking up tech tips was like expecting to inherit
wealth without knowing if one had rich relations. The basic scientific work for the detector was decades
old; it would not yield new science without tachyons. A world fighting rising oceans, deforestation, ozone
depletion, lack of clean air and water, and an increasingly better organized criminal class, could not afford
altars to uncooperative gods. The cost of medical care for the aging, for the treatment of immune-system
diseases, and the monitoring of the millions of drug-damaged individuals was increasing geometrically, as
was the population. The only thing saving his project was its modest cost compared to the big
ground-based projects.

“Maybe I need a rest,” Juan said as he stared at the south polar icecap. It was bright in the sunlight.
Clouds veiled the south Pacific. From a thousand kilometers out, no scars showed. A feeling of
precariousness came over him. Something had dared to distinguish itself from the darkness—a vast
planetary creature wrapped in gases, living on the Sun's streaming energy. What am I doing outside it, he
asked, suddenly incredulous, even though he knew it was only his father again.

The audio monitor sang out a high, varying tone.

Juan switched back to the detector's blue eye. A twitching white line marched across the screen. “I'll get
a fix,” he said, not daring to hope.

“Look,” Malachi said, “the ripples measure to our predictions for a tachyon mass running into the
detector."

Sweating, Juan leaned forward against his straps—but his hopes died. “The signal's coming straight up
from the Antarctic.” He took a deep breath and switched to the main view of Earth, leaving the blue eye
as a bottom-right insert. “Damn Summet, he's got a project of some kind down there!” He looked up at
Malachi, who was scratching up another cigarette. “We've gone to a lot of effort to prevent anything else
from triggering our detector. It's got to be an experiment generating tachyons."

Malachi coughed and slipped his cigarette into a wall slot. “If it's tachyons."

“What else could it be?"

Malachi nodded reluctantly. “At least we'll prove to Summet that our detector works, and be able to
send out more than radio messages. We'll show those shining galactic cultures that we can do more than
put up smoke signals. They might have a rule about replying to radio folk, you know."

The line continued to dance with the steady repetition of its sound analog.

“What are they doing down there?” Juan said.

“Maybe we're supposed to receive while they send. He planned to surprise us, and see whether we
knew what we were doing. Time to call him and say we've caught on."
****

The director of UN Earth Resources Security stared blankly from the screen. “Juan, what are you talking
about?” He ran a bony hand through his graying brown hair and scowled, bunching his thick eyebrows.
“You tell me, Titus."