"James P. Hogan - Giants 5 - Mission to Minerva" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

"sides" seemed to be precludedтАФexcept for the interference paradoxes that
resulted from information leaking across at the tiniest level, from which the
necessary existence of the entire stupefying whole had been inferred. Of
course, this didn't prevent speculation on whether some kind of communication
"horizontally"тАФbetween branchesтАФmight be possible. Even if it were, nobody had
the remotest idea how such a thing would be achieved. It remained just an
intriguing hypothesis, good for philosophical Ph.D. dissertations, becoming
known in obscure journals, and getting a discussion going at cocktail parties.
Nothing in the whole of history suggested any precedent for taking the subject
seriously. . . .

And then, the last pictures came back from the probe that had pursued the
fleeing Jevlenese spacecraft, showing that they had been hurled across
light-years of space and back tens of thousands of years in time to reappear
near the planet Minerva in the era of its habitation by the Lunarians, long
after the Ganymeans had departed. The proof was there, indisputably, that it
had happened. The demonstration that put an abrupt end to any further
speculation as to whether such a happening was possible came to be known as
the "Minerva event."
***

After the years he had spent as Hunt's boss in some capacity or other, Gregg
Caldwell had thought he was past being capable of surprise anymore. Four years
previously, in 2028, when the first evidence of the Lunarians was discovered
on the Moon in the form of a fifty-thousand-year-old spacesuited corpse,
Caldwell, as chief of UNSA's former Navigation and Communications Division,
had set the ebullient Englishman the task of unraveling the mystery of where
"Charlie" had come from. Exactly what reconstructing pictures of vanished
civilizations had to do with the business of navigating UNSA's spacecraft and
maintaining its communications around the Solar System was a good question,
but Caldwell had always been a compulsive empire builder. His way of going
about things was to stake out a claim on getting something done while others
debated the demarcation lines, and possession being nine-tenths of the law,
like some of the ideas of quantum physics that he had been hearing lately, he
created what became reality. Hunt, along with his biologist partner-in-crime,
Christian Danchekker, who now directed the Alien Life Sciences Division, had
responded by causing the story of human origins to be rewritten from its
beginnings. When Caldwell sent the pair of them to Jupiter to look into some
relics of long-vanished aliens that came to light shortly afterward on
Ganymede, they came back with a starship full of live ones. Despatched to
Jevelen to help pinpoint the source of mass mental derangement among the
natives, they turned up an entire functioning universe evolved out of data
structures inside a planet-size computer. But this latest was straining
Caldwell's credulity, even yet.

He sat at the desk, flanked on one side by a wall of display screens, in his
office on the top floor of the Advanced Sciences building, drumming his
fingers on the armrests of his chair while Hunt paced in front of the picture
window overlooking the Goddard complex. Caldwell was stockily built, with
steely gray hair cropped short and the kind of solidly carved, heavy-jowled