"Clarke, Arthur C - Odissey Two" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clarke Arthur C)

'I hate being pushed around, particularly by Victor Millson.'

'Bet he calls you back as soon as the colonel reports.'

'Then we must switch off video and make some party noises. But to be perfectly truthful, at this stage I really don't have anything to say.'

'About what, if I'm allowed to ask.'

'Sorry, dear. It seems that Discovery is playing tricks on us. We thought the ship was in a stable orbit, but it may be about to crash.'

'Into Jupiter?'

'Oh no - that's quite impossible. Bowman left it parked at the inner Lagrange point, on the line between Jupiter and Io. It should have stayed there, more or less, though the perturbations of the outer moons would have made it wander back and forth.

'But what's happening now is something very odd, and we don't know the full explanation. Discovery's drifting more and more rapidly toward Io - though sometimes it accelerates, and sometimes even moves backward. If it keeps this up, it will impact within two or three years.'

'I thought this couldn't happen in astronomy. Isn't celestial mechanics supposed to be an exact science? So we poor backward biologists were always being told.'

'It is an exact science, when everything is taken into account. But some very strange things go on around Io. Apart from its volcanoes, there are tremendous electrical discharges - and Jupiter's magnetic field is spinning round every ten hours. So gravitation isn't the only force acting on Discovery; we should have thought of this sooner - much sooner.'

'Well, it's not your problem anymore. You should be thankful for that.'

'Your problem' - the very expression that Dimitri had used. And Dimitri - cunning old fox! - had known him much longer than Caroline.

It might not be his problem, but it was still his responsibility. Though many others had been involved, in the final analysis he had approved the plans for the Jupiter Mission, and supervised their execution.

Even at the time, he had had qualms; his views as a scientist had conflicted with his duties as a bureaucrat. He could have spoken out, and opposed the old administration's shortsighted policies - though to what extent those had actually contributed to the disaster was still uncertain.

Perhaps it was best if he closed this chapter of his life, and focused all his thoughts and energies upon his new career. But in his heart he knew that was impossible; even if Dimitri had not revived old guilts, they would have surfaced of their own accord.

Four men had died, and one had disappeared, out there among the moons of Jupiter. There was blood on his hands, and he did not know how to wash them clean.



3

SAL 9000



Dr Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana, also had an abiding sense of guilt, but one very different from Heywood Floyd's. Those of his students and colleagues who often wondered if the little scientist was quite human would not have been surprised to learn that he never thought of the dead astronauts. Dr Chandra grieved only for his lost child, HAL 9000.

Even after all these years, and his endless reviews of the data radioed back from Discovery, he was not sure what had gone wrong. He could only formulate theories; the facts he needed were frozen in Hal's circuits, out there between Jupiter and Io.

The sequence of events had been clearly established, up to the moment of the tragedy; thereafter, Commander Bowman had filled in a few more details on the brief occasions when he had re-established contact. But knowing what happened did not explain why.

The first hint of trouble had been late in the mission, when Hal had reported the imminent failure of the unit that kept Discovery's main antenna aligned to Earth. If the half-billion-kilometre-long radio beam wandered off target, the ship would be blind, deaf, and dumb.

Bowman himself had gone out to retrieve the suspect unit, but when it was tested it appeared, to everyone's surprise, to be in perfectly good order. The automatic checking circuits could find nothing wrong with it. Nor could Hal's twin, SAL 9000, back on Earth, when the information was transmitted to Urbana.