"James P. Hogan - Giants 4 - Entoverse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

comfortable, leafy seclusion on terraced slopes divided by steep ravines
climbing from a central valley. The main valley contained a common access road
running alongside a creek that widened at intervals into shady pools fringed
by rocky shelves and overhangs. Although the name was more than a little
forced in the middle of Maryland less than a dozen miles north of the center
of Washington, D.C., and the artificiality of the pseudo-Californian
contouring went without saying, on the whole it had all been pleasingly
accomplished. The effect worked. After the months that he had spent inside the
cramped, miniature metal cities of the UN Space Arm's long-range mission ships
and at its bases down on the ice fields beneath the methane haze of Ganymede,
Hunt wasn't complaining.
He lit a cigarette and exhaled, smiling faintly to himself as the vista
of Redfern Canyons brought to mind the two directors from an Italian urban-
development corporation who had approached him several days previously. Could
the Ganymean "gravitic" technology -- which enabled gravitational fields to be
generated, manipulated, and switched on and off at will as readily as familiar
electrical and magnetic effects -- be somehow engineered into a piece of
mountainous terrain, they had wanted to know, in such a way as to render it
gravitationally flat? The idea was to create high-income habitats, or even
entire townships, in places that would offer all the visual aesthetics of the
Dolomites, and yet be as easy to walk around as Constitution Gardens.
Ingenious, Hunt had conceded.
And typical of human adaptability.
It was hardly a year since mankind had made the first contact with
intelligent aliens and brought them back to Earth; and as if that weren't
enough, the discovery of an interstellar alien culture, and Earth's opening
what promised to become a permanent relationship with it, had followed less
than half as long since, with all the promise which that portended of
unimaginable gains to human knowledge and the greatest single upheaval ever to
occur in the history of the race. The whole edifice of science could crash and
have to be rebuilt afresh; every philosophic insight might be demolished to
its foundations -- but people only became seriously affected when they thought
they saw a way of making a buck or two. The human alacrity for getting back to
business-as-usual would never cease to amaze him, Hunt thought. Ganymeans had
often marveled at the same thing.
Jerry came ambling back down from the house with a six-pack of Coors, a
large bag of potato chips, and a tub of onion-flavored dip. He perched himself
on one of the rocks lining the foot of the bank that Hunt was sprawled on and
passed him a can. "I thought you guys were supposed to drink it warm," he said
again.
"English beer is heavier," Hunt said. "If it's too cold you lose the
taste. It's better at room temperature, that's all -- which in a pub means
cellar temperature, usually a bit less than the bar. Nobody actually warms
it."
"Oh."
"And the lighter lager stuff, which is closer to yours, they prefer
chilled, just like you do. So we're not really so alien, after all."
"That's nice to know, anyhow. We've had enough aliens showing up around
here recently." Jerry flipped open his own can and tilted his head back to
take a swig; then he wiped his mustache with the back of a hand. "Hell, what