"Broderick, Damien - The Dreaming (The Dreaming Dragons)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Broderick Damien)
'I see.' Bill grinned at him. 'I'll try not to defect.'
The polished fuselage was innocent of portholes. Inside, cunning ergonomics engineering had contrived a mahogany conference table flanked by soft-backed stools bolted to the deck. Aft, six comfortable layback chairs faced a series of flat monitors and recessed keyboards. No doubt there was a bar tucked away in there somewhere. Seated in one of the chairs, bleary eyed and friendly, was the astronaut Hugh Lapp. His chin was penumbral. Bill checked his watch and nodded to himself with furtive pleasure. The stigmata was, indeed, very nearly five-o'clock shadow.
'Ah, the cunnilingual Captain.'
'Greetings, sage.' The astronaut patted the padded chair next to him. 'Strap in, we lift off in 30 seconds.'
Bill glanced around, blinked as the hatch was closed and sealed from the outside. 'Just us chickens?' He dropped heavily beside Lapp. A red warning light blinked above the bank of monitors. The roar of engines, which had been increasing since he'd entered the jet, reached a screaming crescendo. A sudden pressure on his torso thrust him back into his yielding seat. The tremor of vibration was gone, and the pressure increased.
'You might enjoy watching this,' Lapp said belatedly pushing a button. One of the screens brightened, revealing the geometry of runway lights falling away vertically at fantastic speed. Somehow the display seemed more real, in the ambience of this surrealistic exercise, than any direct view through the double-glazing of a porthole.
Maybe only what we take for granted seems real through a window, Bill mused. The extraordinary seems more natural when it comes to us via an instrument. Television tells us of war and catastrophe in exotic lands. It shows us men in clumsy suits kangarooing upon the moon. The only exciting things I've ever seen through a window, he thought, amused, were my big sister's big tits when I was twelve.
Curiously, Lapp chose that moment to say: 'It's not the same, is it, Bill? We can up the magnification' -- he twiddled a knob, and the distant lights slurred and expanded giddyingly -- 'or put it through an infrared transducer, with image enhancement' -- and the image leaped into slightly discoloured clarity, the suburbs knife-edged in their ranks -- 'but it's not the same as a raw eyeball. You get the feeling it's all being patched together in a studio.'
Fortunately Bill's neutral grunt was not taken as disagreement, or the younger man might have gone on to defend his opinion. As it was, Bill felt a brief sad sentiment of loss, as though in this gap between them the generational abyss had deepened. Ludicrously, it summoned an echo of that hateful, ineluctable failure of sympathy he detected in his relationship with Ben, child of his late middle age, the severing one by one of those precious links of deep fellow-feeling which had once existed between father and son. Others would grow to replace that earlier, simpler trust, he knew, but there was enough truth in Freud's shrewd conjectures to spoil forever the comradely myths of more archaic dynasties. For a moment the strands of his reverie wound together, in an almost hallucinatory visual memory of the astronaut's embarrassed face lifting from Anne's lewd embrace.
The jet levelled out at 20,000 metres. This data was provided on a digital readout, which stated as well that their indicated air-speed was 2900 klicks, roughly Mach 3 at their altitude. Lapp unbuckled his seat-belt as a green light flashed. 'We've got good weather all the way until we reach the turbulence at the Rock.'
'You seem to know a hell of a lot more about it than I do,' Bill said tiredly. The Rock of Gibraltar? The Libyans have seized it and towed it out to sea, threatening global sea trade. The single weapon proof against the anti-nuclear screen. And they've done it with heinous astral thought projections. 'Does your advance knowledge extend to the location of the drinkies? I could use a bourbon.'
Lapp went forward, opened a panel beside the terminal, returned with Bill's bourbon and a sturdy measure of Southern Comfort for himself. 'That was a freaky experience this morning. Yesterday morning.'
The instant relaxation Bill felt was clearly a psychological effect, since the alcohol had not had time to diffuse through his bloodstream. 'Hugh, I'd rather we talked about our destination.'
'Sure. Let me tell you a story. What you're about to hear is known to less than a thousand people in the entire world. The decision authorising this briefing has been ratified by the Presidents of the United States and Russia.' Lapp was, suddenly, no longer the boy spaceman; a note of command had entered his voice.
'I'm all ears.'
'Way back when, the third lunar landing mission took off for the Fra Mauro uplands. Apollo 13 was commanded by Jim Lovell, with Fred Haise as LEM pilot and John Swigert replacing Tom Mattingly, who was grounded with suspected German measles. Mattingly lost his chance at history, though he still doesn't know it. Do you recall the flight?'
'Well, I caught the Tom Hanks movie on cable. Space flight is a goddamned wasteful boondoggle, even if NASA does fund most of my fun.' Bill watched the ground monitor; faintly, morning light was streaking the earth. 'No offence intended.'
'I'm amazed, Bill,' the astronaut said with some sharpness. 'That's the sort of narrow, reflex response I've come to expect from cocktail party accountants and vitamin-deficient health-food fanatics. I think you'll change your opinion.
'On April 13, 1970, the No. 2 liquid oxygen tank exploded in the service module. The landing mission had to be abandoned. They were not on a "free return" trajectory, and they needed a major burn to avoid falling into solar orbit. MIT computers ran out an optimum program, and Lovell altered the trajectory so the spacecraft would swing past the moon and switch them back to earth. As they rounded the moon, out of radio contact with Mission Control, their instruments were thrown into a tizzy by signals from a crater on Farside.'
DelFord felt his tongue cringe from the liquor. With wild surmise he said, 'Intelligent signals?' Then his common sense returned. 'A Russian base. But I thought their space technology -- '
'No, Bill. The signals were overlaid on half their instrumentation tapes. As soon as the craft emerged from lunar shadow, Lovell employed a contingency security measure: he masered the unknown data to Mission Control through a comsat in synchronous orbit, which microwaved the signal down to the 64-metre dish at Goldstone in California.'
'You really _do_ mean -- '
'I do. Defense Department computers examined the lunar signals and concluded that beyond question they represented a non-human, extraterrestrial intelligence. The signal itself resisted translation and has done so during the intervening decades. The most favoured current hypothesis is that it's so garbled with noise we'll never retrieve it.'
'So we're not alone.' His abrupt, soaring delight startled delFord. Inner space was his realm, he had never felt anything but contempt for those who sought comfort in celestial chariots. Yet this was intelligence, he told himself. Minds capable and dexterous, other than human. Moved by passions as alien, perhaps, as those which Lilly had posited for dolphins. He snapped his head forward intently.
Hugh nodded, teacher commending an apt pupil. 'Apollo itself was run down much faster than originally planned. But of course if there'd been any major inexplicable deviations from the announced itineraries, interested parties all over the world would have pricked up their ears at once. All launches are alarmingly public, to those with adequate equipment. As you surmised, those "failed" Russian and American Mars probes were dummies, a cost-cutting exercise just for show. Keeping the facts restricted has taken the most massive, thorough security operation of all time. There was one moment when the whole schmear almost came unstuck. Do you recall the eighteen-minute "secretarial error" blank on Richard Nixon's Presidential transcripts?'
Throwing his head back, Bill roared with glee.
'The bastard always had a good nose for diversionary tactics. What stopped him?'
'I don't know the details, this is all scuttlebutt. Presumably his lunatic Huns possessed enough vestigial sanity to see the potential consequences. On the other hand, it's quite likely they simply thought he was insane, hallucinating deliverance. Fortunately we have plumbers of our own; the incriminating tape was expunged within hours, and I believe certain persuasions were brought to bear.'
'Immunity from termination with extreme prejudice?'
'Perhaps.'
Bill helped himself to more liquor. 'You mentioned the Soviet Union.'
'It was inevitable. Both nations had so much hardware in lunar orbit it would've been impossible to monopolise the phenomenon for long. One of the Soviet's Luna series automatic probes picked up the signals some months later. It was diverted to a soft landing in the crater. That was the field they'd specialised in after they chose to forego manned landing missions. As it was, a top-ranking Russian selenologist managed to tip off his American counterpart at an international Congress at Baku, Azerbaijan, in the USSR. Plans were already afoot for the Apollo-Soyuz docking, which helped ease tensions. There was no alternative but for both of us to pool our data and form a joint security screen.'
'What happened to the Russian scientist?'
Hugh gave him a thin smile. 'Poor old Anatoli Kubolayev came within a hair of the firing squad. In the event, though, it was a _fait accompli_, so the Central Committee gave him a severe reprimand, a medal, and put him in charge of the Soviet end of the Project. In the meantime, a covert US military launch put a modified Viking survey craft into the alien's crater. Its findings complemented those of the less sophisticated but more mobile Luna probe. They were perched on the remains of a complex built somewhere on the order of 25 million years ago.'
A deep, numinous chill worked through Bill's bones. His eyes drifted to the monitor showing the vast, snow-covered terrain, a sunlit relief map, they were crossing at such speed. We're heading across the Pole, he thought. It would take them -- where? Eastern segment of Russia? Japan, with some slight course changes? But he was wearing a summer suit. Australia, he told himself in astonishment. The enormous, empty island continent at the edge of the Pacific, a bleached sunburnt place, as he recalled, as far removed from this icy landscape as it was possible to conceive.
Yet he knew that his parameters were too narrow. The land below him, and the land he was aimed at like an arrow, were old -- far older than 25 million years. The Oligocene, he thought. The Pyrenees and the Apennines had already been born, and the Alps of Europe were getting uplift surgery. To the far west, a land bridge had linked Alaska to Asia. Or was his geology out of date, retired by plate tectonics? He felt terrible weariness. How little time there was to know everything, when everything changed so fast, so much. The land below him, and its mirror on the world's far side, was old -- did it learn? Or did it merely suffer change? Harsh, inhospitable to man and beast, it was of the earth; it knew the long cycles of climate, its rocks wore down under ice or sun to sand, and its sand turned, when it was permitted, to soil, and as the planet wheeled the soil received sun or water and brought forth flowers in profusion. No terrain on earth was utterly barren of life; nowhere had the land suffered the frigid nights and the scorching days of the moon's marias and mountains. Life was possible, below, in the howling winter, at the world's extremities, even if it was not welcomed. But the alien complex had waited patiently through 25 million years of lunar desolation...
The astronaut sat in decent silence while Bill regained himself. Deftly, then, he took a disk from his jacket and pushed it into the audiovisual control panel. 'I have some digitised videotapes of the alien installation. This has been edited down from a series of Viking and Luna probe transmissions. Considering that the data had to be transmitted from the surface of the moon through a relay satellite in lunar orbit and a second comsat to earth, the quality is pretty good.'
A NASA emblem briefly lit a second screen, followed by an identification tag. Then Bill was looking along a vast, black scarp, its upper edge brilliant as molten metal. He drew a deep, reflex breath, felt himself falling into the blackness, felt the enormous gulf of ebon sky above that sun-scarred cliff merge with the black of the inner crater wall to form an emptiness that seemed to suck at his soul ... The camera angle started to shift, panning across the crater; the moment of paralysis was broken.
Lapp registered his expression. 'It's awesome enough, I think you'll grant me that. These shots are from the modified Viking, which landed just at the beginning of a dawn period. The camera is now tracking toward the source of the signals. You can't see anything much yet because the crater's far wall blocks the sun, so they've edited out ... ah, there we are.'
Bill's pulse jumped. The floor of the crater, far below, had sprung into visibility. Without atmosphere to scatter light, the image was preternaturally acute. For a moment, in the loss of its customary cues to depth, his eye was baffled. This segment of the moon was not the grey-tan-brown of all the lunar features he'd seen portrayed in the past. If a giant had taken a huge black glass ashtray, heated it until the glass was ready to flow, then flung a titanic cube of blue steel into it so that streaks and ribs and filaments of glass had exploded outward to cool and set in grotesque patterns, his work would have looked like this.
'My God, what happened to it? A spacecraft impact?' A forgotten image leaped to his mind: the catastrophic detonation over the Tungus _taiga_ in June, 1908, the colossal cosmic fireball which a journalist named Baxter had claimed was a crashed interstellar craft. Brother to this ancient ruin?
'No, it was definitely a base of some kind. We've code-named it "Selene Alpha", though to date we've found no further traces of the aliens elsewhere on the moon. That mess, as far as we can tell, is the end-result of a nuclear attack against Selene Alpha.'
'_Nuclear?_' Finally the pieces slotted together. He could have kicked himself. The vast metal cube, tilted and battered, had not been volatilised, though the crater in which it stood had been devastated by those stellar fires. 'The gluon shield. It was protected. That's where you got it.'
The astronaut leaned forward, pressed his hands together until the bones cracked. 'We weren't ready to build the screen in 1970, Bill. Decades later, our theoreticians are still tearing at their hair. Selene Alpha was partially protected by a gluon shield system, but the weapons which attacked it were even more advanced. Most of the critical mechanisms overloaded, fused into slag. There was just enough for us to work from. Our experimental rigs are still at the stage of Fermi's Chicago football stadium pile. But there's more to it than that.'
The picture had shifted to the vantage of another robot probe, this one situated on the glassy crater floor. Sagging, one corner sunk in melted rock, Selene Alpha loomed in view. It was magnificent: a lonely, timeless, equivocal tribute to some ancient species who had conquered the stars before humanity's ancestors had left the African grasslands. And perhaps, Bill brooded, it was tombstone as well, for many of that race must have perished in the nuclear blast. Or had they found their escape? Had the screen done its job, as a fuse melts by design under power overload, even as its components flared to slag?
'If the Alpha complex is a ruin, what sent the signals the Apollo 13 crew intercepted?'
'Alpha isn't entirely a ruin. All of its mechanisms were solid state -- no moving parts. Apparently the few still in operating condition recognised the crew as life forms within orbital range and switched themselves on. We're assuming the signals constituted a part of the aliens' navigational network. Their technology was fantastic, Bill.'
Indeed, he thought. Considering that even some residue of the system works 25 million years after a nuclear bombardment. If it had all been abandoned in mint condition, he knew, such longevity would still have been all but inconceivable.
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