"James P. Hogan - Endgame Enigma" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

ENDGAME ENIGMA
by JAMES P. HOGAN (1987)


[VERSION 1.1 (Sep 04 04). If you find and correct errors in the text, please
update the version number by 0.1 and redistribute.]


To EDWARD JOSEPH, my third son in a row,
who, after three daughters in a row,
restored my faith in mathematics by proving
that the law of averages does work in the end,
provided one gives it long enough.


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to the following people for their
help and advice in writing this book:
Brent Warner of NASA's Goddard Space Center, Maryland, who spent many
hours thinking about pendulums, gyroscopes, vortexes, and rotating geometries,
and gallantly placed his sanity at risk by sharing for a while the weird kind
of world that s. f. writers inhabit. Jim Waligora of NASA's Johnson Space
Center, Houston, for information on the physiology of low pressures and
spacesuit design. Steve Fairchild of Moaning Cavern, Murphys, California, for
thoughts on just about everything and his invaluable penchant for devil's
advocacy. Lynx Crowe of Berkeley, California, for suggestions on security
methods. David Robb of Applied Perception Technologies, Minneapolis, for lots
of data on space colonies. Cheryl Robinson, who helped hatch Lewis and his
companions from a pile of barren notes. Owen Lock of Ballantine Books, for
sharing some of his immense knowledge of the world of military intelligence.
Kathy Sobansky, for her assistance with Russian language translations. And
Takumi Shibano, for his guidance in penetrating Oriental inscrutability.
And then there was Jackie, who doubled as electrician, plumber, handyman,
auto mechanic, gardener, chauffeur, and carpenter, as well as being a mother
to three small, rowdy boys -- and never once complained about the hours a
writer works. She made the book possible; they made it necessary.


PROLOGUE

The MIG-55E fighter-bomber, code-named "Grouse" in Western military
parlance, was rugged, easy to maintain, and equipped for a variety of
ground-attack roles, making it popular for counterinsurgency operations among
rulers of the Third World's teetering Marxist regimes. Western military
intelligence was interested in it, too, because it carried the first
production version of the Soviet OC-27/K target-designating and -tracking
computer, which the counter-measures experts were anxious to learn more about.
Like most Soviet aircraft, ships, and ground units, the MIG carried a
black box that could compute its position accurate to a few feet anywhere on