"01 - Code of the Lifemaker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

Code of the Lifemaker

By James P. Hogan

Prologue

THE SEARCHER

1.1 MILLION YEARS B.C.;

1,000 LIGHT-YEARS FROM THE SOLAR SYSTEM

HAD ENGLISH-SPEAKING HUMANS EXISTED, THEY WOULD PROBABLY have translated
the spacecraft's designation as "searcher." Unmanned, it was almost a mile
long, streamlined for descent through planetary atmospheres, and it
operated fully under the control of computers. The alien civilization was
an advanced one, and the computers were very sophisticated.

The planet at which the searcher arrived after a voyage of many years was
the fourth in the system of a star named after the king of a mythical race
of alien gods, and could appropriately be called Zeus IV. It wasn't much to
look atЧan airless, lifeless ball of eroded rock formations, a lot of
boulders and debris from ancient meteorite impacts, and vast areas of
volcanic ash and dustЧbut the searcher's orbital probes and surface landers
found a crust rich in titanium, chromium, cobalt, copper, manganese,
uranium, and many other valuable elements concentrated by thermal-fluidic
processes operating early in the planet's history. Such a natural abundance
of metals could support large-scale production without extensive dependence
on bulk nuclear transmutation processesЧin other words, very
economicallyЧand that was precisely the kind of thing that the searcher had
been designed to search for. After completing their analysis of the
preliminary data, the control computers selected a landing site, composed
and transmitted a message home to report their findings and announce their
intentions, and then activated the vessel's descent routine.

Shortly after the landing, a menagerie of surveyor robots, equipped with
imagers, spectrometers, analyzers, chemical sensors, rock samplers,
radiation monitors, and various manipulator appendages, emerged from the
ship and dispersed across the surrounding terrain to investigate surface
features selected from orbit. Their findings were transmitted back to the
ship and processed, and shortly afterward follow-up teams of tracked,
legged, and wheeled mining, drilling, and transportation robots went out to
begin feeding ores and other materials back to where more machines had
begun to build a fusion-powered pilot extraction plant. A parts-making
facility was constructed next, followed by a parts-assembly facility, and
step by step the pilot plant grew itself into a fully equipped,
general-purpose factory, complete with its own control computers. The
master programs from the ship's computers were copied into the factory's
computers, which thereupon became self-sufficient and assumed control of
surface operations. The factory then began making more robots.