"Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace (V1)Txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

"Oh, they said they wanted the cargo analyzed, which was bullshit. The only stuff besides food and ammo were some solar cells and replacement boards for field mainframes. So we know they use Mitsubishi. But if they buy anything from a Rimcorp firm, we automatically get copies of the invoices. So I'm sure that was no big surprise."

"So why'd they send you?"

"Nobody said officially, but I got a thread on my vertical jack that they were feeling out Sam, Samantha." "She's the one who, her friend?" "Got beaten up and raped, yeah. She didn't do too well."

"Who would?"

"I don't know. Sam's pretty tough. But she wasn't even half there."

"That would go rough on her? If she got a psychiatric discharge."

"They don't like to give them, unless there's actual brain damage. They'd either 'find' that or put her through an Article 12." I got up to find some catsup for my potatoes. "That might not be as bad as rumor has it. Nobody in our company has gone through it."

"I thought there was a congressional investigation of that. Somebody with important parents died."

"Yeah, there was talk. I don't know that it got any further than talk. Article 12 has to be a wall you can't climb. Otherwise half the mechanics in the army would try for a psych discharge."

"They don't want to make it that easy." "So I used to think. Now I think part of it is keeping a balanced force. If you made an Article 12 easy, you'd lose everyone bothered by killing. The soldierboys would wind up a berserker corps."

"That's a pretty picture."

"You should see what it looks like from inside. I told you about Scoville."

"A few times."

"Imagine him times twenty thousand." People like Scoville are completely disassociated from killing, especially with the soldierboys. You find them in regular armies, too, thoughЧpeople for whom enemy soldiers aren't human, just counters in a game. They're ideal for some missions and disastrous for others.

I had to admit the potatoes were pretty good. I'd been living on bar food for a couple of days, cheese and fried meats, with corn chips for a vegetable.

"Oh... you didn't get on the cube this time." She had her cube monitor the war channels and keep any sequences where my unit appeared. "So I was pretty sure you were having a safe, boring time."

"So shall we find something exciting to do?"

"You go find something." She picked up the plates and carried them to the sink. УI have to go back to the lab for half a day."

"Something I could help you with?"

"Wouldn't speed it up. It's just some data formatting for a Jupiter Project update." She sorted the plates into the dishwasher. "Why don't you catch up on your sleep and we'll do something tonight."

That sounded good to me. I switched the phone over, in case somebody wanted to bother me on Sunday morning, and returned to her rumpled bed.

THE JUPITER PROJECT WAS the largest particle accelerator ever built, by several orders of magnitude.

Particle accelerators cost moneyЧthe faster the particle, the more it costsЧand the history of particle physics is at least partly a history of how important really fast particles have been to various sponsoring governments.

Of course, the whole idea of money had changed with the nanoforges. And that changed the pursuit of "Big Science."

The Jupiter Project was the result of several years' arguing and wheedling, which resulted in the Alliance sponsoring a flight to Jupiter. The Jupiter probe dropped a programmed nanoforge into its dense atmosphere, and deposited another one on the surface of Io. The two machines worked in concert, the Jupiter one sucking up deuterium for warm fusion and beaming the power to the one on Io, which manufactured elements for a particle accelerator that would ring the planet in Io's orbit and concentrate power from Jupiter's gargantuan magnetic field.