"John Dalmas - Yngling 2 - Homecoming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dalmas John)

impersonally, of new and unknown planets. The subject was the mother planet, Earth.
Spectral readings indicated a planetary temperature approximately two and a half
Celsius degrees below twenty-first century levels. The absorption spectrum indicated no
significant change in atmospheric C02, and a reduction in water vapor compatible with

the temperature change. Albedo seemed high, suggesting greater than old-normal cloud
cover, but the existing level was not outside the limits of twenty-first century variability.

What everyone was really waiting for were exploration flights within the atmosphere. It
was the northern hemisphere springтАФthe computer said May 24 by the Gregorian
calendarтАФand as the shadow of night moved out over the eastern Atlantic, the Phaeacia
began a close survey pattern 900 kilometers above sea level. Carefully she scanned for
the radiation signatures of cities. And found none.

Pinnace Alpha launched at shipтАЩs midday and began scouting the sunlit Americas from
within the troposphere. She sighted villages reminiscent of early American Indian
villages, in openings seemingly cleared by fire. Baby ice sheets glistened whitely in
Keewatin, the Ungava Peninsula, and the Canadian Rockies, and forests covered the
eastern half of North America from the Gulf of Mexico to north of Lake Superior.

In 2100 A.D. there had been more than 1.47 billion people in the western hemisphere.
Matthew Kumalo radioed that there would hardly be more than five or ten million now.

тАЬDuty daysтАЭ yielded in part to the dictates of the solar day on Earth. Low-level flights
followed the sunrise into eastern Asia and across the Eurasian land mass; its ancient
cities were rubble or less, many grown over with forests. There were no new cities;there
were only pretechnology towns.

After several days the exploration team decided on Contact PrimeтАФthe town where first
contact would be made with the people of Earth. It stood beside the old Danube ship
canal, a short distance from the Black Sea. Single-masted ships lay in its harbor. Though
not the largest of the new townsтАФit was four kilometers acrossтАФit seemed clearly the
most advanced. Most towns looked like something from the Middle Ages: haphazard,
ugly, and surrounded by hostile stone bastions. This town, by contrast, was rigorously
geometrical, with a harmonious kind of severe beauty, an angular regularity that
demonstrated the existence there of mathematicians and planners. And unfortified. Its
stadium would accommodate tens of thousands, Matthew thought. A tall black tower
rose from a palace with terraced roof gardens, the most impressive structure they had
seen either here or at home.


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Homecoming


Whatever had happened to mankind on Earth, Matthew thought to himself, it was rising
with a new civilization. He felt cautiously eager to visit Contact Prime, to begin learning
what had happened, and what was happening now.