"James P. Hogan - Giants 1 - Inherit The Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

At sixteen, Victor won a scholarship to Cambridge to study mathematics,
physics, and physical electronics. He moved into lodgings there with a fellow
student named Mike who sailed boats, climbed mountains, and whose father was a
marketing director.
When his uncle moved to Africa, Victor was adopted as a second son by
Mike's family and spent his holidays at their home in Surrey or climbing with
Mike and his friends, first in the hills of the Lake District, North Wales,
and Scotland, and later in the Alps. They even tried the Eiger once, but were
forced back by bad weather.
After being awarded his doctorate, he remained at the university for
some years to further his researches in mathematical nucleonics, his papers on
which were by that time attracting widespread attention. Eventually, however,
he was forced to come to terms with the fact that a growing predilection for
some of the more exciting and attractive ingredients of life could not be
reconciled with an income dependent on research grants. For a while he went to
work on thermonuclear fusion control for the government, but rebelled at a
life made impossible by the meddlings of uninformed bureaucracy. He tried
three jobs in private industry but found himself unable to muster more than a
cynical indisposition toward playing the game of pretending that annual
budgets, gross margins on sales, earnings per share, or discounted cash flows
really meant anything that mattered. And so, when he was just turning thirty,
the loner he had always been finally asserted itself; he found himself gifted
with rare and acknowledged talents, lettered with degrees, credited with
achievements, bestowed with awards, cited with honors -- and out of a job.
For a while he paid the rent by writing articles for scientific
journals. Then, one day, he was offered a free-lance assignment by the chief R
and D executive of Metadyne to help out on the mathematical interpretation of
some of their experimental work. This assignment led to another, and before
long a steady relationship had developed between him and the company.
Eventually he agreed to join them full-time in return for use of their
equipment and services for his own researches -- but under his conditions. And
so the Theoretical Studies "Department" came into being.
And now...something was missing. The something within him that had been
awakened long ago in childhood would always crave new worlds to discover. And
as he gazed out at the Vega ships...
His thoughts were interrupted as a stream of electromagnetic vibrations
from somewhere below was transformed into the code which alerted the Mercury's
flight-control processor. The stubby wing outside the cockpit dipped and the
aircar turned, beginning the smooth descent that would merge its course into
the eastbound traffic corridor that led to the heart of the city at two
thousand feet.
Chapter Five

The morning sun poured in through the window and accentuated the
chiseled crags of the face staring out, high over the center of Houston. The
squat, stocky frame, conceivably modeled on that of a Sherman tank, threw a
square slab of shadow on the carpet behind. The stubby fingers hammered a
restless tattoo on the glass. Gregg Caldwell, executive director of the
Navigation and Communications Division of UN Space Arm, reflected on
developments so far.