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

outskirts of Houston sliding by below the UNSA jet. The mind-numbing impact of
Caldwell's revelations had by this time abated sufficiently for him to begin
putting together in his mind something of a picture of what it all meant.
Of Charlie's age there could be no doubt. All living organisms take into
their bodies known proportions of the radioactive isotopes of carbon and
certain other elements. During life, an organism maintains a constant ratio of
these isotopes to "normal" ones, but when it dies and intake ceases, the
active isotopes are left to decay in a predictable pattern. This mechanism
provides, in effect, a highly reliable clock, which begins to run at the
moment of death. Analysis of the decay residues enables a reliable figure to
be calculated for how long the clock has been running. Many such tests had
been performed on Charlie, and all the results agreed within close limits.
Somebody had pointed out that the validity of this method rested on the
assumptions that the composition of whatever Charlie ate, and the constituents
of whatever atmosphere he breathed, were the same as for modern man on modern
Earth. Since Charlie might not be from Earth, this assumption could not be
made. It hadn't taken long, however, for this point to be settled
conclusively. Although the functions of most of the devices contained in
Charlie's backpack were still to be established, one assembly had been
identified as an ingeniously constructed miniature nuclear power plant. The
U235 fuel pellets were easily located and analysis of their decay products
yielded a second, independent answer, although a less accurate one: The power
unit in Charlie's backpack had been made some fifty thousand years previously.
The further implication of this was that since the first set of test results
was thus substantiated, it seemed to follow that in terms of air and food
supply, there could have been little abnormal about Charlie's native
environment.
Now, Charlie's kind, Hunt told himself, must have evolved to their human
form somewhere. That this "somewhere" was either Earth or not Earth was fairly
obvious, the rules of basic logic admitting no other possibility. He traced
back over what he could recall of the conventional account of the evolution of
terrestrial life forms and wondered if, despite the generations of painstaking
effort and research that had been devoted to the subject, there might after
all be more to the story than had up until then been so confidently supposed.
Several thousands of millions of years was a long time by anybody's standards;
was it so totally inconceivable that somewhere in all those gulfs of
uncertainty, there could be enough room to lose an advanced line of human
descent which had flourished and died out long before modern man began his own
ascent?
On the other hand, the fact that Charlie was found on the Moon
presupposed a civilization sufficiently advanced technically to send him
there. Surely, on the way toward developing space flight, they would have
evolved a worldwide technological society, and in doing so would have made
machines, erected structures, built cities, used metals, and left all the
other hallmarks of progress. If such a civilization had once existed on Earth,
surely centuries of exploration and excavation couldn't have avoided stumbling
on at least some traces of it. But not one instance of any such discovery had
ever been recorded. Although the conclusion rested squarely on negative
evidence, Hunt could not, even with his tendency toward open-mindedness,
accept that an explanation along these lines was even remotely probable.