"David Drake - Fallen Angels" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

Gordon didn't say anything. Alex watched him a moment longer then turned his attention to the gauges.
Gordon was nineteen. There had always been an Ice Age, so it did not surprise him that the glaciers had
crept farther south. Alex thought he remembered a different world-тАФgreen, not white-тАФbefore his
parents brought him upstairs. He wasn't sure how much of it was genuine childhood memories and how
much was movies or photographs in books. The habitats had a fair number of books on tape, brought up
when they still got along with the Downers.



The green hills of earth, he thought. Now the glaciers-тАФnot rivers of ice, but vast oceans of ice-тАФwere
spreading south at tens of miles a year. Hundreds of miles in some places. In the dictionary, "glacial"
meant slow; but Ice Ages came on fast. Ten thousand years ago the glaciers had covered England and
most of Europe in less than a century. They'd known that since the sixties . . . though no one had ever
seen fit to revise his schoolbooks. But what did that matter? To a school kid a century was forever
anyway.



As for Gordon . . . He glanced again at his copilot. Well, what the world is like in our lifetimes is what it
should be like forever. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. It was funny to think of
groundside environmentalists desperately struggling against Nature, trying to preserve forever the
temporary conditions and mayfly species of a brief interglacial. Alex looked again through the cockpit
windscreen and sighed.
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"We could have stopped it," he said abruptly.



"Eh?" Gordon gave him a puzzled glance.



"The Ice Age. Big orbiting solar mirrors. More microwave power stations. Sunlight is free. We could
have beamed down enough power to stop the ice. Look what one little SUNSAT has done for
Winnipeg."



Gordon studied the frozen planet outside. He shook his head. "Ya nye ponim├бl," he admitted. "I faked
the examiners, but I never did get it. The what-did-they-call-it, polar ice cap? It stayed put for thousands
of years. Then, of a sudden it reaches out like vast white amoeba."