"CLARKE, Arthur C. - Odyssey 4 - 3001 The Final Odyssey" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clarke Arthur C)

Though the stars must be shining out there, his light-adapted eyes could see nothing but black emptiness beyond the curve of the great window. As he started to walk towards it to get a wider view, Indra restrained him and pointed straight ahead.

'Look carefully,' she said 'Don't you see it-'

Poole blinked, and stared into the night. Surely it must be an illusion - even, heaven forbid, a crack in the window...

He moved his head from side to side. No, it was real. But what could it be? He remembered Euclid's definition 'A lie has length, but no thickness'.

For spanning the whole height of the window, and obviously continuing out of sight above and below, was a thread of light quite easy to see when he looked for it, yet so one-dimensional that the word 'thin' could not even be applied. However, it was not completely featureless; there were barely visible spots of greater brilliance at irregular intervals along its length, like drops of water on a spider's web.

Poole continued walking towards the window, and the view expanded until at last he could see what lay below him. It was familiar enough: the whole continent of Europe, and much of northern Africa, just as he had seen them many times from space. So he was in orbit after all - probably an equatorial one, at a height of at least a thousand kilometres.

Indra was looking at him with a quizzical smile.

'Go closer to the window,' she said, very softly. 'So that you can look straight down. I hope you have a good head for heights.'

What a silly thing to say to an astronaut! Poole told himself as he moved forward. If I ever suffered from vertigo, I wouldn't be in this business...

The thought had barely passed through his mind when he cried 'My God!' and involuntarily stepped back from the window, Then, bracing himself, he dared to look again.

He was looking down on the distant Mediterranean from the face of a cylindrical tower, whose gently curving wall indicated a diameter of several kilometres. But that was nothing compared with its length, for it tapered away down, down, down - until it disappeared into the mist somewhere over Africa. He assumed that it continued all the way to the surface.

'How high are we?' he whispered.

'Two thousand kay. But now look upwards.'

This time, it was not such a shock: he had expected what he would see. The tower dwindled away until it became a glittering thread against the blackness of space, and he did not doubt that it continued all the way to the geostationary orbit, thirty-six thousand kilometres above the Equator. Such fantasies had been well known in Poole's day: he had never dreamed he would see the reality - and be living in it.

He pointed towards the distant thread reaching up from the eastern horizon.

'That must be another one.'

'Yes - the Asian Tower. We must look exactly the same to them.'

'How many are there?'

'Just four, equally spaced around the Equator. Africa, Asia, America, Pacifica. The last one's almost empty - only a few hundred levels completed. Nothing to see except water...'

Poole was still absorbing this stupendous concept when a disturbing thought occurred to him.

'There were already thousands of satellites, at all sorts of altitudes, in my time. How do you avoid collisions?'

Indra looked slightly embarrassed.

'You know - I never thought about that - it's not my field.' She paused for a moment, clearly searching her memory. Then her face brightened.

'I believe there was a big clean-up operation, centuries ago. There just aren't any satellites, below the stationary orbit.'

That made sense, Poole told himself. They wouldn't be needed - the four gigantic towers could provide all the facilities once provided by thousands of satellites and space-stations.