"Allen, Roger MacBride - Chronicles of Solace 3 - Shores of Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allen Roger Macbride)

Neshobe had spent many a night wondering: Did DeSilvo fail toread the evidenceЧor did he fail to understand it, or refuse to believe it? Or did he read it carefully, understand it perfectly, believe it completelyЧand forge ahead anyway?

NeshobeТs thought flitted briefly to Anton Koffield, the man who had discovered the fraud, the man who had come to warn Solace, who had been cruelly tricked and punished for doing so, the man who had discovered that DeSilvo had faked his own death and was likely alive, the man she had sent off in pursuit of DeSilvo.

It had been nearly two years since Koffield had departed on his mission to find DeSilvo. There was no word of him since a sketchy intel report, now over a year old, that had him leaving EarthТs Solar System. Nothing since. It was not time to give up hopeЧbut it was just about time to stopexpecting Koffield to return.

HellТs bells and damnation,she thought.ItТs past time to expect anything good to happen.

The countdown display caught her eye, and she focused again on the matter at hand, on the marvelous irony that they had turned to DeSilvoТs century-old scribblings on the backs of envelopes for a solution to the problem.

The core of the conundrum came down to this: No matter how cleverly they made use of planetary alignments to shield the other worlds, it was impossible to ignite a replacement for the SunSpot without releasing massive amounts of radiation, twenty times more than enough to sterilize an entire hemisphere of GreenhouseЧindeed, something more than a hemisphere, as the replacement SunSpot swept overhead in its orbit. And if they killed that much of Greenhouse, Greenhouse could no longer supply the biomass and living things needed to keep SolaceТs ecology creaking along.

DeSilvo had seen the answer to that problemЧbut heТd seen it generations before technical advances made it possible to do the engineering that made the answer practical.

Temporal confinement had made interstellar flight vastly more convenientЧonce the equipment for it became cheap, light, and powerful enough to be widely useful. Generate a spherical temporal confinement field, and time inside the field would slow down by whatever factor you wishedЧif you pumped sufficient power into the field. Slow time down enough, and a hundred-year-long passage between the stars would seem to last only weeks, days, or even minutes.

Electromagnetic radiation passing through a temporal confinement field did not slow down, but instead experienced Doppler-shift effects, slipping down the electromagnetic spectrum, becoming far-lower-energy radiations. Beam gamma rays and hard X rays into a 15,000,000:1 temporal confinement field, and sensors inside the field would detect nothing more malign than easily managed infrared, visible light, and ultraviolet radiation. Visible light would be detectable only as radio waves.

DeSilvoТs back-of-the-envelope solution, little more than a doodle or two of a planet with a circle drawn around it, a crude representation of the SunSpot, and a few scribbled numbers alongside, had become one of the most famous graphic images in the Solacian system over the last few years. It had been endlessly reprinted, and used to illustrate innumerable news reports about the Ignition Project. There was a reproduction of it hanging on the port-side bulkhead of NeshobeТs cabin. She turned to glance at it. The legend under the doodles said it all:



Use Sunspot Output & Put G-house in Temp Confine Field.



Simple enough in conceptЧbut almost impossible in execution. In theory, and given modern temporal confinement technology, draining the remaining power output from the old SunSpot would provide more than adequate power to run the confinementЧbut how to store, then channel, that much power that fast? Besides, a confinement had to be powered from theinside, and the whole point of the operation was to keep the old and new SunSpots on theoutside of the confinement. Beyond all that, no one had ever attempted to create a temporal confinement field a tenth, a hundredth, a thousandth as large as would be required to shield Greenhouse.

And that was only the start of the list of problemsЧthe big, obvious problems. There was an endless series of others. For example: Was there any point in attempting to evacuate the hemisphere of Greenhouse over which Ignition would occur? Thousands lived in domes near the target area.

If the Ignition attempt failed, after the last of the SunSpotТs power had already been drained, Greenhouse would descend into the cold and dark that was the natural environment of a small world in the outer reaches of a star system. No living thing on Greenhouse would survive for more than a few days, except for places with their own power sources. Besides, there simply were not the ships, crews, places of refuge, or other resources to evacuate the satellite before a failure, let alone after, when the job would be far more difficult. The cold-blooded analysis said that anyone remaining on Greenhouse after a failed Ignition attempt was dead anyway.

In the end, that whole murky debate was resolved by looking not at what was desirable, or necessary, but what was possible. Neshobe Kalzant knew better than anyone just what resources were available, and what could and could not be done. Time and treasure spent on an evacuation plan that merely made people feel better was a luxury they could no longer afford, whatever the political advantage there might be to running an evac.

There were a thousand such choices, large and small, mixing science, engineering, logic, politics, and the rawest of emotions, that Neshobe had been forced to make. Never had she been able to make them based on complete information or even a solid idea of the risks. It seemed as if nothing was solid anymore.

And always, in the back of her mind, was the story Wandella Ashdin had told about Glister, a world in a nearby star system that been wrecked by a similar series of disasters.

The Glisterns had met a series of worsening setbacks with a series of Уall-outФ efforts. Every Уall-outФ effort had drained resources and diverted them from other uses where they might have done some good. Worse and worse climatic disasters were met by Уall-outФ responses that grew weaker and weaker, until the disasters were so vast, and the remaining ability to respond so weakened, that Glister collapsed altogether.

Neshobe had diverted vast resources to ignite the NovaSpot and save Greenhouse. With every authorization of time, materials, ships, equipment, people, or money, she had asked herselfwhat will be left ? When the next bad news cameЧand it would comeЧwould the cupboard be bare?

In a sense, the answer didnТt matter. Greenhouse was vital to the long-term and short-term survival of Solace. If they didnТt save Greenhouse, they were all dead anyway, and there was no need to waste time worrying about what they could and could not afford.

Time.Neshobe blinked and came back to herself. She had been staring, unseeing, at the countdown clock, and yet had completely lost track of how much time there was left. She refocused her eyes and her attention.Twenty minutes, fifteen seconds . Not very longЧbut long enough to keep worrying.

But no,she thought.The displays would show it. WeТd know already if anything was going wrong. WouldnТt we?

She was appalled to find herself suddenly missing the soothing tones of the voice of Ignition Control. Still, she resisted the temptation to turn up the sound.