"David Brin - Just a Hint" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

the waving wheatfields in the valley several miles away. A low pride of cumulus
clouds drifted overhead, cleanly white.
In the distance he could see a gleaming Rapitrans pull into the station at the local
industrial park. Tiny specks that were commuters wandered away from the train and
slowly dispersed into the decorously concealed factories that blended into the hills
and greenery.
 It was, indeed, a beautiful day.
Birds were singing. A pair flew right past his window. He followed them with his
eyes until he saw that they were building a nest in the skeleton of what was to have
been the new hundred-meter radio telescope.
There was a rumbling in the sky. Above the high bank of clouds a formation of
military transports made a brief glint of martial migration. The faint growling of their
passage had become an almost daily occurrence.
Federman turned away from the window. Inside, except where the brilliant shaft
of light fell, there appeared to be only dimness. He spoke in the general direction of
his friend and student.
"I was only thinking that maybe we've been missing the forest for the trees. It
might be something so simple... something another culture with a different
perspective might..."
"Might what, Sam?" Liz's voice had an edge to it. "If there ever were peaceful
cultures on Earth, they didn't have the other half of the solution--a way to keep from
getting clobbered by the other guy who isn't peaceful! If they did have that answer
too, where are they now?"
"Look at the world! Western, Asian, African, it makes no difference which culture
you look at. They're all arming as fast as they can. Brushfire wars break out
everywhere, and every month the Big Blow doesn't happen makes worse the day
when it does!"
Federman shrugged and turned to look out the window again.
"Maybe you're right. I suppose I'm just wishing for a deus ex machine." His eyes
lovingly coveted the abandoned, unfinished dish outside.
"Still, we've done so well otherwise," he went on. "The simple problems with
obvious answers are all being solved. Look at how well we've managed to clean up
the environment, since people found out about the cancer-causing effects of
pollution in the seventies and eighties. Sure, there was inertia. But once the solution
became obvious we went ahead and did the logical thing to save our lives."
"I can't escape the feeling, though, that there's a similar breakthrough to be made
in the field of human conflict... that there's some obvious way to assure freedom and
dignity and diversity of viewpoint without going to war. Sometimes I think it's just
sitting there, waiting to be discovered, if only we had just a hint."
Liz was silent for a moment. When she spoke again it was from the other edge of
the window. She too was looking out at the spring morning, and at the armed
convoy in the sky.
"Yes," she said softly. "It would be nice. But to be serious, Sam, do you really
think you could get any more funding than you've already got, to do your spare-time
search for radio messages from space? And even if you were successful, do you
think the Big Blow would wait long enough for us to decipher a message, then send
one of our own, and eventually ask complex questions on sociology?"
 She shook her head. "Would they be similar enough to us to understand what
we'd be asking? Do you really think we're missing something so fundamentally
simple that just a hint over the light-years would make that much difference?"