"Alan Dean Foster - Flinx 4 - End of the Matter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

The drone protested electronically its own destruction, but its message was not heard or seen.
That wasn't the drone's fault. There was, at the moment of ingestion, simply nothing to see. But
other instruments were better equipped to tell of those last seconds, and they told the drone
station all that was necessary.
Several months passed.
In the station's center a circuit closed. Powerful machinery was engaged. All the information
gathered by a dozen far-ranging drones was concentrated into a tight beam for deep-space
transmission. With a violent belch of energy, the station spat the knowledge to an occasionally
manned station on a far-distant humanx colony world. That station shunted the transmission on to
another world, and then on to another, and finally on to Earth, one of the Commonwealth's two
capitals. Commonwealth Science Headquarters was located there, on the outskirts of a city on a
high mountain plain whose inhabitants had once practiced human sacrifice.
Patiently computers decoded, unraveled, and otherwise made the transmission comprehensible. One
small portion of that information was marked for special notice. In due course it reached the eyes


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of a competent but bored human being. As she examined the information, her eyes grew wide and her
boredom vanished. Then she alerted others-human and thranx-and initial puzzlement became panic,
then metamorphosed into stunned resignation. The information was reprocessed, rechecked,
reexamined. The science staff of the station became reresigned to the situation.
A meeting quickly convened on the other side of the world. The four people present-two human, two
thranx-were very important-important enough to have passed beyond arrogance to humility.
One of the thranx was the 'current President of the Commonwealth, the other head of all
Commonwealth- sponsored scientific research. One of the humans was the Last Resort of the United
Church. The other would not normally be considered as important as the other three beings
assembled in that room, but circumstances had temporarily made him so. He was the technical
supervisor in charge of processing drone information at the Mexico City complex.
When the discussion finally had run out of new things that needed saying, the aged President
trieint "Drusindromid folded truhands over his thorax and sighed through his spicules. His chiton
shone violet with many years, and his antennae drooped so low they hung before his glowing
compound eyes. He turned multicolored ornmatidia on the waiting human technician. "The information
is accurate. There are no mistakes. This you are sure of?'
Both the human technician and the thranx science chief nodded, the human adding: "We are running
an- other drone to the area, sir. It will move on a projected intercept path. Since by the time
the drone reaches the region the sun which was being absorbed will have been completely destroyed,
we will have to depend on nonvisual instrumentation to detect the wanderer. But I don't really
think all this is necessary, sir. The first drone's report is unchallengeable."
"I know the speed of which those drones are capable," the President murmured. "Yet this object is
so massive that it surely will have sucked an entire star into itself by the time the new drone
arrives?"
"Yes, Honored One," the thranx science chief admitted dolefully. "The radiation that first led our
drone to it was from the last of the sun's plasma being dravm off from the surface. That portion
of space was full of a ginhought amount of particulate radiation, especially gamma rays. It-'тАЭ The
science chief respectfully halted, seeing that the President was absorbed with less technical
worries.
The old thranx shook his head slowly, a gesture the insectoids had picked up near the beginning of
the Amalgamation, the joining of human- and thranxkind several hundred years ago. "This course,"