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

With his legs driving like slow pistons, he attacked the ever steepening
slope.


Chapter One

Accompanied by a mild but powerful whine, a gigantic silver torpedo rose
slowly upward to hang two thousand feet above the sugar-cube huddle of central
London. Over three hundred yards long, it spread at the tail into a slim delta
topped by two sharply swept fins. For a while the ship hovered, as if savoring
the air of its newfound freedom, its nose swinging smoothly around to seek the
north. At last, with the sound growing, imperceptibly at first but with
steadily increasing speed, it began to slide forward and upward. At ten
thousand feet its engines erupted into full power, hurling the suborbital
skyliner eagerly toward the fringes of space. Sitting in row thirty-one of C
deck was Dr. Victor Hunt, head of Theoretical Studies at the Metadyne
Nucleonic Instrument Company of Reading, Berkshire -- itself a subsidiary of
the mammoth Intercontinental Data and Control Corporation, headquartered at
Portland, Oregon, USA. He absently surveyed the diminishing view of Hendon
that crawled across the cabin wall-display screen and tried again to fit some
kind of explanation to the events of the last few days.
 His experiments with matter-antimatter particle extinctions had been
progressing well. Forsyth-Scott had followed Hunt's reports with evident
interest and therefore knew that the tests were progressing well. That made it
all the more strange for him to call Hunt to his office one morning to ask him
simply to drop everything and get over to IDCC Portland as quickly as could be
arranged. From the managing director's tone and manner it had been obvious
that the request was couched as such mainly for reasons of politeness; in
reality this was one of the few occasions on which Hunt had no say in the
matter.
To Hunt's questions, Forsyth-Scott had stated quite frankly that he
didn't know what it was that made Hunt's immediate presence at IDCC so
imperative. The previous evening he had received a videocall from Felix
Borlan, the president of IDCC, who had told him that as a matter of priority
he required the only working prototype of the scope prepared for immediate
shipment to the USA and an installation team ready to go with it. Also, he had
insisted that Hunt personally come over for an indefinite period to take
charge of some project involving the scope, which could not wait. For Hunt's
benefit, Forsyth-Scott had replayed Borlan's call on his desk display and
allowed him to verify for himself that Forsyth-Scott in turn was acting under
a thinly disguised directive. Even stranger, Borlan too had seemed unable to
say precisely what it was that the instrument and its inventor were needed
for.
The Trimagniscope, developed as a consequence of a two-year
investigation by Hunt into certain aspects of neutrino physics, promised to be
perhaps the most successful venture ever undertaken by the company. Hunt had
established that a neutrino beam that passed through a solid object underwent
certain interactions in the close vicinity of atomic nuclei, which produced
measurable changes in the transmitted output. By raster scanning an object
with a trio of synchronized, intersecting beams, he had devised a method of