"Adams, Douglas -hitchhikers guide to the galaxy part 5" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Douglas)

the void.
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that
was wrong.
Further investigation quickly established what it was that had
happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The
ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had
neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment
which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a
meteorite.

The first thing to do was to try to seal up the hole. This turned
out to be impossible, because the ship's sensors couldn't see that
there was a hole, and the supervisors which should have said that
the sensors weren't working properly weren't working properly
and kept saying that the sensors were fine. The ship could only
deduce the existence of the hole from the fact that the robots
had clearly fallen out of it, taking its spare brain, which would
have enabled it to see the hole, with them.
The ship tried to think intelligently about this, failed, and then
blanked out completely for a bit. It didn't realise it had blanked
out, of course, because it had blanked out. It was merely surprised
to see the stars jump. After the third time the stars jumped the
ship finally realised that it must be blanking out, and that it was
time to take some serious decisions.
It relaxed.
Then it realised it hadn't actually taken the serious decisions
yet and panicked. It blanked out again for a bit. When it awoke
again it sealed all the bulkheads around where it knew the unseen
hole must be.
It clearly hadn't got to its destination yet, it thought, fitfully,
but since it no longer had the faintest idea where its destina-
tion was or how to reach it, there seemed to be little point
in continuing. It consulted what tiny scraps of instructions it
could reconstruct from the tatters of its central mission mod-
ule.
`Your !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! year mission is to !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!,
!!!!! !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!, land !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! a safe distance !!!!! !!!!!
..... ..... ..... .... , land ..... ..... .....
monitor it. !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!...'
All of the rest was complete garbage.
Before it blanked out for good the ship would have to pass
on those instructions, such as they were, to its more primitive
subsidiary systems.
It must also revive all of its crew.
There was another problem. While the crew was in hibernation,
the minds of all of its members, their memories, their identities
and their understanding of what they had come to do, had all
been transferred into the ship's central mission module for safe
keeping. The crew would not have the faintest idea of who they
were or what they were doing there. Oh well.