"James P. Hogan - Giants 3 - Giant's Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

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Giant's Star -- James P. Hogan

(Version 1.0 -- 12/08/2001)


Prologue

By the beginning of the fourth decade of the twenty-first century, it seemed that the
human race was finally beginning to learn to live together and that it was on its way to the
stars. Having abandoned the crippling arms race and disbanded the bulk of their strategic forces,
the superpowers were instead pouring their billions into a massive transfer of Western technology
and know-how to the nations of the Third World. With the increased wealth and living standards
that came universally with global industrializalion, and the security and variety that accompanied
more affluent life-styles, population became self-limiting, and hunger, poverty, along with most
of mankind's other traditional age-old scourges, at last looked as if they were on the brink of
being eradicated permanently. While the U.S. -- U.S.S.R. rivalry transformed itself into a war of
wits and diplomacy for economic and political influence among the stabilizing nation-states, Man's
adventure lust found its expression in a revitalized, multinational space program, which burst
outward across the solar system in a new wave of exploration and expansion coordinated under a
specially formed UN Space Arm. Lunar development and exploitation proceeded rapidly, permanent
bases appeared on Mars and in orbit above Venus, and a series of large-scale manned missions
reached the outer planets.
But probably the greatest revolution of the times was the upheaval in science that had
followed some of the discoveries made on the Moon and out at Jupiter in the course of these
explorations. In the space of just a few years, a series of astonishing discoveries had toppled
beliefs unquestioned since the beginnings of science, forced a complete rewriting of the history
of the solar system itself, and culminated in Man's first encounter with an advanced alien
species.
A hitherto unknown planet, christened Minerva by the investigators who unraveled its
story, had once occupied the position between Mars and Jupiter in the solar system as originally
formed,
and had been inhabited by an advanced race of eight-foot-tall aliens who came to be known
as the "Ganymeans" after the first evidence of their existence came to light on Ganymede, largest
of the Jovian moons. The Ganymean civilization, which flourished up until twenty-five million
years before the present, vanished abruptly. Some of Earth's scientists believed that
deteriorating environinental conditions on Minerva might have forced the "Giants" to migrate to
some other star system, but the matter had not been settled conclusively. Much later-some fifty
thousand years prior to the current period in Earth's history-Minerva was destroyed. The bulk of
its mass, thrown outward into an eccentric orbit on the edge of the solar system, became Pluto.
The remainder of the debris was dispersed by Jupiter's tidal effect and formed the Asteroid Belt.
While the pieces of this puzzle were still being fitted together, a starship from the
ancient Ganymean civilization returned. Having undergone a relativistic time dilation that was
compounded by a technical problem in the vessel's spacetime-distorting drive system, the net
result was that an elapsed time of twenty-odd years for the ship corresponded to the passing of
something on the order of a million times that number on Earth. The Shapieron had departed from
Minerva before the onset of whatever had befallen the rest of the Ganymean race, and its occupants
were therefore unable to either confirm or refute the theories of the terrestrial researchers
involved with the subject. The Giants stayed for six months, combining their efforts with those of