"William Forstchen - Article 23" - читать интересную книгу автора (Forstchen William R)

He smiled and many in the room chuckled, remembering the famous and rather scatological statement
made before a hearing committee which had been convened to investigate the so-called "unacceptable
risks and casualties" associated with the Academy.

"No society in the history of the human race has ever advanced without taking risks. In your history
classes you learned about the great Chinese explorers of the 14th and early 15th centuries who sailed as
far as Zanzibar aboard three-masted ships. They were on the very edge of leaping outward, of sweeping
the world, but then their new emperor lost his nerve and declared that the risk, the lives, and the money
involved were too great. And so it was that less than a hundred years later the Portuguese came to them
instead, with disastrous results for that ancient empire.

"My own ancestors sailed the open seas in then-longboats and perished by the thousands in the doing of
it. All of you have learned that most basic of principles taught by history, that they who do not explore,
expand, and achieve will be replaced by others who do. I remember one of my favorite quotes, from
Scott of Antarctica, the great British explorer who perished on his quest to reach the South Pole. One of
his last diary entries made when he knew he was dying stands, in its simple eloquence, as a guiding
beacon for the spirit of what we are, in both triumph and defeat. He wrote, "We took risks, we knew we
took them, and things have come out against us, therefore we have no need for complaint.'"

Thorsson stepped from behind his podium and began to pace the stage.

"That is what we are! Stoic both in defeat and in triumph. That is the spirit which must shape us, and, in
the shaping, lead us onward to the stars."

He smiled softly.

"For the stars await us. You all know what I have done, where I have been. I first went into space over
forty years ago, aboard the last flight of the old United States Shuttle Two. I even witnessed a flight of the
original shuttle when I was a boy back in 1997.1 was on the first team to go to Mars and the second
team to orbit Jupiter. And yet I would trade all of that, all of it, to be where you now are. And that's not
just an old man wishing to be young again. Not at all. For I believe that before much longer you young
men and women will lead the way on the journey to the stars.

"If Earth is our nursery, then the solar system is our playground, our backyard realm of adventures. But
pretty soon, far sooner than anyone dares imagine, we will be setting sail for Alpha Centauri, Wolfs Star,
Betelgeuse and Sirius. I'm not giving away any great secrets here. Maybe we'll crack the secret of that
alien ship we are reassembling and master light speed, or maybe we'll go the long slow way at a fraction
of light speed aboard Ark ships, but one way or the other we will go!"

Justin found himself nodding excitedly. Thorsson had just alluded to the greatest non-secret of everyone
involved in space. Nine years back the mysterious raiders, known simply as the Tracs, had staged an
attack and destroyed several colonies. Thorsson himself had managed to bag one of the Trac ships, and
even now it was reported that recovery teams were scouring a billion cubic kilometers of space looking
for wreckage and parts in a painstaking effort to put the ship back together, piece by piece.

Mankind had known that someone or something else was out there for forty-five years, ever since the
SETI project, the "Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence," had confirmed a clear signal being detected
from Proximus Gemini. Ten years later the first of three Trac raids had occurred. Who they were, where
they came from, what they even looked like was a complete mystery. No one even knew if the SETI