"James P. Hogan - Giants 2 - The Gentle Giants of Ganymede" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

or more ahead of Earth's. They christened the giants the "Ganymeans," to
commemorate the place of the discovery.
The Ganymeans had originated on Minerva, a planet that once occupied the
position between Mars and Jupiter but which had since been destroyed. The bulk
of Minerva's mass had gone into a violently eccentric orbit at the edge of the
Solar System to become Pluto, while the remainder of the debris was dispersed
by Jupiter's tidal effects and formed the Asteroid Belt. Various scientific
investigations, including cosmic-ray exposure-tests on material samples
recovered from the Asteroid Belt, pinpointed the breakup of Minerva as having
occurred some fifty thousand years in the past -- long, long after the
Ganymeans were known to have roamed the Solar System.
The discovery of a race of technically advanced beings from twenty-five
million years back was exciting enough. Even more exciting, but not really
surprising, was the revelation that the Ganymeans had visited Earth. The cargo
of the spacecraft found on Ganymede included a collection of plant and animal
specimens the likes of which no human eye had ever beheld -- a representative
cross section of terrestrial life during the late Oligocene and early Miocene
periods. Some of the samples were well preserved in canisters while others had
evidently been alive in pens and cages at the time of the ship's mishap.
The seven ships that were to make up the Jupiter Five Mission were being
constructed in Lunar orbit at the time these discoveries were made. When the
mission departed, a team of scientists traveled with it, eager to delve more
deeply into the irresistibly challenging story of the Ganymeans.

A data manipulation program running in the computer complex of the mile-
and-a-quarter-long Jupiter Five Mission command ship, orbiting two thousand
miles above Ganymede, routed its results to the message-scheduling processor.
The information was beamed down by laser to a transceiver on the surface at
Ganymede Main Base, and relayed northward via a chain of repeater stations. A
few millionths of a second and seven hundred miles later, the computers at
Pithead Base decoded the message destination and routed the signal to a
display screen on the wall of a small conference room in the Biological
Laboratories section. An elaborate pattern of the symbols used by geneticists
to denote the internal structures of chromosomes appeared on the screen. The
five people seated around the table in the narrow confines of the room studied
the display intently.
"There. If you want to go right down to it in detail, that's what it
looks like." The speaker was a tall, lean, balding man clad in a white lab
coat and wearing a pair of anachronistic gold-rimmed spectacles. He was
standing in front and to one side of the screen, pointing toward it with one
hand and clasping his lapel lightly with the other. Professor Christian
Danchekker of the Westwood Biological Institute in Houston, part of the UN
Space Arm's Life Sciences Division, headed the team of biologists who had come
to Ganymede aboard Jupiter Five to study the early terrestrial animals
discovered in the Ganymean spacecraft. The scientists sitting before him
contemplated the image on the screen. After a while Danchekker summarized once
more the problem they had been debating for the past hour.
"I hope it is obvious to most of you that the expression we are looking
at represents a molecular arrangement characteristic of the structure of an
enzyme. This same strain of enzyme has been identified in tissue samples taken