"Hogan, James P - The proteous Operation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


The help and cooperation of the following is gratefully acknowledged:

Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, and Isaac Asimov for their agreement to appear as "guest" characters.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York, for permission to reproduce the Einstein letter.

Robert Samuels of the Department of Chemistry, Georgia Institute of Technology

Mark Looper, Mike Sklar, and Bob Grossman of Princeton University

Brent Warner of the Department of Physics, Ohio State University

Steve Fairchild of Moaning Cavern, Murphys, California Lynx Crowe of Berkeley, California

Charley, Gary, and Rick of Charley's Bookstore, Sonora, California

Ralph Newman and Jack Cassinetto of Sonora, California

Dorothy Alkire of Manteca, California

Dick Hastings and the staff of Tuolumne County Library,

Sonora, California

U.S. Navy Treasure Island, San Francisco

U.S. Air Force, Langley AFB, Virginia

And, of course, Jackie

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Proteus

OLD MAN OF THE SEA of Greek mythology, to whom all of the past, present, and future was known, but who would assume various forms to avoid revealing it.
Only when he was captured and constrained to a particular manifestation could the future be determined with certainty . . . strangely reminiscent of the collapse of the quantum-mechanical wave function.

THE
PROTEUS
OPERATION


PROLOGUE

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1974, dawned sullenly over the Virginia coast, with raindrops spitting from a wet, overcast sky, and ill tempered squalls scuffing white the wavetops of a choppy, gunmetal sea. Looking like a flecked carpet unrolled upon the surface, a straight, foamy wake extended out of the eastern mists to mark the course of the nuclear-driven attack submarine USS Narwhal, now within sight of its home base at Norfolk and being escorted over the last few miles by a flock of lazily wheeling seagulls, filling the air with their raucous lament. From the sinister black of the submarine's hull to the dirty off-whites of the seagulls and the spray, the world was a composition of soggy grays.

The grayness seemed fitting, Commander Gerald Bowden thought as he stood with the first navigation officer and a signalman, looking out from the bridge atop the Narwhal's twenty-foot-high "sail." Color came with babies and flowers, sunny mornings and springtimes: new things beginning. But corpses were pale; the sick, "ashen-faced"; the ailing, "gray with exhaustion." Along with strength and life, color drained from things that were nearing their end. It seemed fitting that a world without a future should be a world without color also.