"James P. Hogan - Craddle of Saturn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

Keene initiated the start-up and felt himself being squashed back in his seat as he increased


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reactant flow to bring the NIFTV quickly up to eighty percent power. Lead gloves encased his
hands. He felt his cheeks and lips weighed back over his facial bones, baring his teeth. Smaller
screens on the bulkhead in front of him showed deformed parodies of the faces of Ricardo and Joe.

"Lateral thrusters on. Pulsing to commence roll now," Joe grated, his mouth barely moving.

"APU ahead low, declination twenty-seven degrees and increasing," Ricardo reported. "We're twelve-
point-two miles off the axis and holding. Course projection is clear."

It was a stunt to get the world's attention. The news channels had publicized that the Defense
Department would be testing a new propulsion system designed for low-orbit maneuvering and
announced it as a breakthrough. While the spaceplane was now in its maximum acceleration phase,
the NIFTV was not only overtaking it but tracing a spiral twenty-plus miles in diameter about its
courseтАФliterally running rings around it. A comm beam latched on again to deliver another tirade.
Ricardo looked questioningly at Joe; Joe made a tossing-away motion with his head; Ricardo grinned
and switched the call over the detour link to Control.

"Yeaaah!" Keene whooped, smacking the armrests of his seat. "Was that a bird? Was it a plane? No,
it was us, guys. Hey, look at that thing. It's like a dead duck in the water out there."

"Eat our dust, General," Ricardo sang.

The APU went into a slow curve. Joe altered thrust parameters and stayed with it easily. He ran an
eye over the monitors and gave a satisfied nod. "Okay," he said to the others. "Take her up to
full burn. Now let's show them what we can really do."

As the NIFTV accelerated along its continuing spiral course, a white haze of more distant light
appeared along the top edge of the screen, moving slowly down to blot out the starfield
background. It grew until it became part of a vast band extending off the screen on both sides,
losing the APU spaceplane in its brilliance as it became a background to it.

2
The planetoid had come out of Jupiter. It was christened Athena.

For more than half a century, there had been astronomers dissenting from the mainstream view of
planetary origins, trying to make themselves heard. The generally accepted nebular theory, in
which the Sun, its planets, and their satellites all condensed together from a contracting cloud
of primordial gas and dust, they maintained, was not tenable. The observed distribution of angular
momentum did not fit the model, and tidal disruption by Jupiter would have prevented the accretion
of compact objects inside its orbit. Some proposed an alternative mechanism for the formation of
the inner planets based upon analysis of the fluid dynamics of Jupiter's core. According to this
theory, the giant planet's rapid rotation and rate of material acquisition would result in
periodic instabilities leading to eventual fission and the ejection of surplus mass. The bulk of
the shed matter would most likely be thrown out of the Solar System, but lesser drops torn off in