"Forward, Robert L - Rocheworld 01 - Rocheworld (The Flight of the Dragonfly) 5.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Forward Robert L)

"I'm going to miss you, Ben," said William. He turned and looked around the yard at the other animals in his private zoo.
"I'm going to miss all of you," he said. "But I've got to go to the stars..." He paused. "...and I'm never coming back."
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*CHAPTER 3 -- CHOOSING*
The next morning the three of them gathered together to resume the choosing of the crew for _Prometheus_.
"Who's recommended for Communications Officer?" asked Jinjur. "Technically, whoever is in that position is Third Officer."
"The person recommended is Colonel Alan Armstrong," said Dr. Wang. "But there's a portion of his file that's classified."
"_That_ hunk of pseudo-Adonis?" shouted Jinjur. "I'd love to have him in bed, but not in my command. Who else?"
"There are others, General Jones," said George. "But methinks thou doth protest too much. What saith you, chirurgeon?"
"George is right, Jinjur," said Dr. Wang. "Alan is the best choice."
"OK," said Jinjur. "But I still don't trust Greek faces bearing cleft chins."
* * * *
Colonel Alan Armstrong walked briskly through the familiar corridors of the Pentagon and made his way to the office of General Beauregard Darlington Winthrop III, Chief of Staff of the Air Force. The General's secretary had her back to the desk, putting something in the filing cabinets along the wall. Alan looked her over before he spoke and noticed a slight bulge of plumpness that was not there two years ago. She must have let herself go once he'd stopped seeing her.
"Hello, Maybelline," he said in a deep voice.
The secretary jumped -- then turned with a wide-eyed, hopeful smile on her face.
"Why, hel-lo, Col-o-nel A-rm-strong," she said, batting her eyelids nervously at him. Her face developed a longing expression.
Alan's automatic protective mechanisms turned on his charm. His blue eyes sparkled, his cheeks dimpled, and the radiant smile above his cleft chin so dazzled the poor girl that she forgot her heartache at being jilted, and just wanted to do anything to please this wonderful man.
"Could I see General Winthrop now?" he asked her.
"Su-re-ly," she said, and without taking her eyes off him, she reached for the intercom lever.
"Col-o-nol A-rm-strong to see you, sir," she announced. She turned to watch him as he walked past her through the ornate wooden doors. His smile shifted rapidly as it switched from emitting one type of charm, to another more suitable for friendly superiors instead of idolizing inferiors.
Alan walked across the acres of blue carpet with little concern, for he had scuffed his feet across the Seal of the Air Force Chief of Staff many times in his career. He thought back to his first time. He had been scared then, when as a young First Lieutenant he had risked his career by demanding a private meeting with the Air Force Chief of Staff. It had been General Youngblood at that time. Alan, fresh from studying mathematics and astrophysics at Cambridge on a Rhodes scholarship after a brilliant career at the Air Force Academy, had found a military use for the new digital astronomy technique that he had invented, and he refused to tell anyone about it but the Chief of Staff. Fortunately for his neck, he had been able to convince General Youngblood that he knew what he was talking about.
The Russians had always wondered why the space astronomy budget for the Greater National Aeronautics and Space Agency suddenly grew almost as big as GNASA's budget for manned space flight. They also noticed the meteoric rise in rank of a young Air Force officer named Armstrong, but fortunately they never connected the two, and Armstrong's invention was still one of the best kept secrets of the Greater United States.
Alan marched briskly up to General Winthrop's desk, gave a snappy salute, a "Colonel Armstrong reporting, Sir," and without waiting for permission, turned and sat in the straight chair sitting at the side of the desk.
Winthrop looked up and beamed at the bright young man. His face then took on a worried look as he paused to figure out how to break the bad news. Colonel Armstrong had asked to be commander of the Barnard interstellar mission. It was beyond Winthrop's understanding why anyone would want to set off in a cramped spacecraft for a forty-year one-way trip to nowhere. But ... what Alan wanted, Alan usually got. Not this time, however. Alan's lack of flight experience had made it impossible for Winthrop and the rest of the Air Force to convince the President to make Colonel Armstrong the mission commander. Major General Jones, the Marine Lightsail Interceptor Fleet Commander, had been chosen for that position. Winthrop had been sure that he could get the second spot for Armstrong, and had promised Alan the position and a promotion to Brigadier General.
Winthrop had forgotten about Colonel Gudunov's friends in Congress. When the dust had settled, Gudunov was second in command and Alan was third. As far as Winthrop knew, this was the first time Alan had come in third at anything ... sports, school grades, and womanizing included. He coughed nervously and looked off to one side, refusing to meet Alan's eyes. Armstrong's famous smile faded during the long pause. There was now a furrow of concern on his brow. Suddenly, they were interrupted by a buzzer on a pink telephone. Winthrop grabbed it.
"Winthrop here," he said. "We're secure." He listened for a moment, then said.
"I'll be right down. I'm bringing Armstrong with me. Alert the guard."
He turned to look at Alan, who had risen to his feet at the words.
"They have your 'Pink-Eye' locked on General Molotov, Head of the Russian Strategic Forces, and he's receiving his classified dispatch case."
Winthrop led the way through a door to his private suite at the rear of the office. A small bedroom, bathroom, parlor, and kitchen/bar made it possible for him to stay within reach of his command desk and their all-important colored telephones twenty-four hours a day.
They didn't go into the suite, but stopped at one of the three multi-colored elevators at the end of the small hallway. Winthrop entered the pink one, waited for Armstrong to board, then pushed the single button inside. A pink door hissed shut and they dropped rapidly downward into the bomb-proof bunkers deep below the Pentagon.
The door hissed open and they stared at the barrel of a machine-gun sticking through a swivel-port under a thick pane of bullet-proof glass imbedded in a tiny triangular room lined with armor plate. The guard recognized them and a tinny voice echoed in the cramped metallic box.
"You first, General Winthrop."
Winthrop went to the featureless door on the right side, palmed a panel, and walked into a man-lock. A moment's pause, another hiss, and the voice spoke again.
"The lock is clear, Colonel Armstrong."
Armstrong palmed the door open and stepped in as the door closed automatically behind him. Having been here many times before, he knew the procedure. Both palms on the slanted glass plates and both eyes in the rubber cups of the iris scanner. There was another hiss and the exit door opened. He stepped out and hurried after Winthrop, who was halfway down the corridor. They met another guard, who opened a pink door. They entered the room that only a small handful of people knew existed, the Pink Room, run by the Air Force Space Intelligence Office, an organization that never appeared on organization charts.
Across the front of the room were a number of status boards. The first showed a picture of the globe and the present position of the large GNASA Interstellar Telescope. It was an unusual telescope and its basic design had been invented by Alan when he had been studying at Cambridge. It was a spider-web mesh of glass fibers carrying optical signals back and forth from the complex optical computer at the center to millions of coherent optical detectors sitting at the intersection of each node in the hundred kilometer diameter net. Each optical detector peered outward into the blackness of the deep sky through a holographic tissue-lens that captured as many of the weak interstellar light photons as it could. Each lens was a meter across, and was only capable of resolving moderately spaced binary-star pairs.
Alan's design for the telescope as a whole, however, had a phase-locked reference laser signal sent to each detector to mix with the incoming light photons. The result was an amplified copy of the incoming photons, with a frequency and phase tag that told the central computer just exactly where in space and time that particular photon packet had been captured. The computer took all these quadrillions of pieces of information and used them to electronically synthesize a perfect telescope lens a hundred kilometers across. The GNASA astronomers (sometimes they were Russian astronomers on exchange visits) were not only able to resolve close binary-star systems throughout the galaxy, but were also able to resolve continent-sized objects on the planets around the nearest stars. They were currently mapping Gargantua and its many moons in the Barnard system.
The Russian intelligence experts had originally been suspicious of such a large eye-in-the-sky. But the design was in the open literature, and as long as the array of lenses was pointed outward toward the stars, they stopped being concerned about it.
What they didn't know, and what Armstrong had suggested to General Youngblood many years ago, was that one hologram lens looks just like any other, a colorless sheet of plastic film. It is trivial to design the rings of varying index of refraction in the hologram lens so that the sheet acts like two lenses at one time. It can be an outward-going lens at one frequency, and a retro-reflecting lens at another frequency. It had been simplicity itself to set up a covert holographic lens manufacturing facility and underbid the competition for the production of the lenses for the GNASA construction contract. As a result, GNASA got more than they paid for -- two lenses in each holo-tissue instead of just one. The only other modification was a separate laser tuned to the frequency of the retro-lens and a covert optical demultiplexer that extracted the retro-beam information before it got to the GNASA computer.
There were three optical computers on board the Interstellar Telescope for redundancy. They were all kept powered up so that the backup computers would be instantly ready in case the prime computer failed. They were good designs, and it was seldom that the Air Force had to turn off its covert connection to the third backup computer to allow the GNASA astronomers to use it. Right now, everyone was happy. Some visiting Russian astronomers at the GNASA Space Astronomy Center at Goddard were pulling high-resolution images of planets in the Barnard solar system from one side of the telescope, while the Air Force intelligence officers in the Pink Room at the Pentagon were pulling high resolution images of General Molotov's office from the other side.
On the other screens in the room were pictures of various scenes inside Russia, such as submarine pens, railroad cars, and truck convoys, while on the central screen was a picture of an office taken through French doors that opened onto a small garden on the roof of a windowless fourteen-story office building. The desk in the room was large and ornate. It reminded Winthrop of his, with its many different telephones. There was a flag to one side, and the sharp point of a sickle could be seen in the folds in the upper corner. There were three men in the room. The burly one with his back to the window stood up to sign a piece of paper, which he handed back to the smaller man. In return he received a locked dispatch case. The messenger saluted and left and the third man approached the desk holding a key. He unlocked the case and left, taking the key with him. The bulky man sat down and Alan could see the four stars on his shoulders. It was Molotov all right.
"Now just lean back a little," said Winthrop under his breath, and obediently the image leaned back comfortably in his swivel chair and started reading the highly secret document, little realizing that someone was reading over his shoulder from ten thousand kilometers out in space.
The intelligence officer zoomed in until the sheet of paper filled the screen. A tell-tale blink indicated that an image had been permanently recorded.
"Noviye Strategicheskiye Obyekti..." said Armstrong softly.
"You can read those goddamn hashmarks!?!" asked Winthrop in amazement. "What does it say?"
"Russian is one of the three languages I picked up at Cambridge in addition to Etonese," said Armstrong. "The heading of the letter is 'New Strategic Targeting Assignments', and it seems to be a list of the principle strategic targets in the Greater United States, Europe, and China. The interesting thing is that a number of missiles that used to be targeted for us have been switched to China."
"That's consistent with the heating-up of tensions on the Mongolian border," said the head of the Pink Room staff, who was standing on the other side of Winthrop. As General Molotov reached the end of the first page and turned it over, he sat up in his chair and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his desk.
"Lean back, you goddamn Commie!" hollered Winthrop. But the head of the Pink Room, having seen the blink, reassured him.
"We got it before he moved, General," he said. "Let me show you." He went over to a nearby console and soon one of the side screens showed a still picture of General Molotov reading the first page. He flicked through a series of stills, then froze on one showing General Molotov's hand flipping the first page. Except for a small portion near the bottom where the General's shoulder had gotten in the way, they could read every word on the second page.