"Gardner Dozois - Chains of the Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

to the ground, like confetti streamers thrown from a window, like Slinkys
going down a flight of stairs. In the films, the alien ships appeared to
recede from the viewpoint of the reconnaissance planes, vanishing into
perspective, and that was all right, but the ships also appeared to dwindle
away into infinity from the viewpoint of Spacetrack East on the ground, and
that definitely was not all right. The most constructive comment ever made on
this phenomenon was that it was odd. It was also odd that the spaceships had
not been detected approaching Earth by observation stations on the Moon, or by
the orbiting satellites, and nobody ever figured that out, either.
From the first second of contact to touchdown, the invasion of Earth




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had taken less than ten minutes. At the end of that time, there were four big
ships on the ground, shrouded in thick steam -- _not_ cooling off from the
friction of their descent, as was first supposed; the steam was actually mist:
everything had frozen solid in a fifty-foot circle around the ships, and the
quick-ice was now melting as temperatures rose back above freezing -- frantic
messages were snarling up and down the continentwide nervous system of
USADCOM, and total atomic war was a hairsbreadth away. While the humans
scurried in confusion, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) created by MIT-Bell
Labs linked itself into the network of high-speed, twentieth-generation
computers placed at its disposal by a Red Alert Priority, evaluated data
thoughtfully for a minute and a half and then proceeded to get in touch with
its opposite number in the Russian Republics. It had its own, independently
evolved methods of doing this, and achieved contact almost instantaneously,
although the Pentagon had not yet been able to reach the Kremlin -- that
didn't matter anyway; they were only human, and all the important talking was
going on in another medium. AI "talked" to the Russian system for another
seven minutes, while eons of time clicked by on the electronic scale, and
World War III was averted. Both Intelligences finally decided that they didn't
understand what was going on, a conclusion the human governments of Earth
wouldn't reach for hours, and would never admit at all.
The only flourish of action took place in the three-minute lag between
the alien touchdown and the time AI assumed command of the defense network,
and involved a panicked general at USADCOM HQ and a malfunction in the --
never actually used -- fail-safe system that enabled him to lob a small
tactical nuclear device at the Colorado landing site. The device detonated at
point-blank range, right against the side of the alien ship, but the fireball
didn't appear. There didn't seem to be an explosion at all. Instead, the hull
of the ship turned a blinding, incredibly hot white at the point of
detonation, faded to blue-white, to a hellish red, to sullen tones of violet
that flickered away down the spectrum. The same pattern of precessing colors
chased itself around the circumference of the ship until it reached the impact
point again, and then the hull returned to its former dull black. The ship was
unharmed. There had been no sound, not even a whisper. The tactical device had
been a clean bomb, but instruments showed that no energy or radiation had been
released at all.