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

mere days the star erupted into a supernovaЧradiating with a billion times
the brightness of the Sun, exploding outward until its photosphere enclosed
a radius greater than that of Uranus' orbit, and devouring its tiny flock
of planets in the process.

Those planets had been next on the searcher's list to investigate, and it
happened that the ship was heading into its final approach when the star
exploded. The radiation blast hit it head-on at three billion miles out.

The searcher's hull survived more-or-less intact, but secondary x-rays and
high-energy subnuclear particlesЧthings distinctly unhealthy for
computersЧflooded its interior. With most of its primary sensors bumed out,
its navigation system disrupted, and many of its programs obliterated or
altered, the searcher veered away and disappeared back into the depths of
interstellar space.

One of the faint specks lying in the direction now ahead of the ship was a
yellow-white dwarf star, a thousand light-years away. It too possessed a
family of planets, and on the third of those planets the descendants of a
species of semi-intelligent ape had tamed fire and were beginning to
experiment with tools chipped laboriously from thin flakes of stone.

Supernovas are comparatively rare events, occurring with a frequency of
perhaps two or three per year in the average galaxy. But as with most
generalizations, this has occasional exceptions. The supernova that almost
enveloped the searcher turned out to be the first of a small chain that
rippled through a localized cluster of massive stars formed at roughly the
same time. Located in the middle of the cluster was a normal, longer-lived
star which happened to be the home star of the aliens. The aliens had never
gotten round to extending their civilization much beyond the limits of
their own planetary system, which was unfortunate because that was the end
of them.

Everybody has a bad day sometimes.

ONE MILLION YEARS B.C.

One hundred thousand years after being scorched by the supernova, the
searcher drifted into the outer regions of a planetary system. With its
high-altitude surveillance instruments only partly functioning and its
probes unable to deploy at all, the ship went directly into its descent
routine over the first sizeable body that it encountered, a frozen ball of
ice-encrusted rock about three thousand miles in diameter, with seas of
liquid methane and an atmosphere of nitrogen, hydrogen, and methane vapor.
The world came nowhere near meeting the criteria for worthwhile
exploitation, but that was of no consequence since the computer programs
responsible for surface analysis and evaluation weren't working.

The programs to initiate surface activity did work, however, more or less,
and Factory One, with all of its essential functions up and running to at