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

face that suggested granite slabs and lunar crags. His expression remained
impassive despite the excitement that Hunt was still unable to contain. Just
what kind of reaction should be expected from someone who had talked to
another version of himself, calling on the phone from another universe,
Caldwell wasn't exactly sure. If the story had come from anyone other than Vic
Hunt, he would simply have refused to believe it. Hunt had also kicked his
lifetime smoking habit not long ago, which probably added to the theatrics.

"Gregg, it means that somewhere in another part of the Multiverse they've
figured it out," Hunt said, not for the first time. "Somewhere corresponding
to a future ahead of where we are right now." As a rule, he kept his thought
processes orderly enough to avoid such repetition. Caldwell granted that these
were somewhat unusual circumstances. "It must have been some kind of test to
establish a channel across time lines. They were going to send us a file
containing what they knew, but the link went down too soon. My God, Gregg! Can
you imagine what it would mean if this ever became routine? Suppose you could
get a copy of a new Shakespeare play that he never wrote in our history! Or an
authentic account of how the pyramids were really built! What do you think
that kind of cross-cultural fertilization might be worth?"

"Let's not get too carried away by that for now, and just stick to the
basics," Caldwell suggested. "We figure it had to be some kind of
communications relay that appeared out there in orbit." The message routing
log into Goddard had shown the signal to have come in via a channel that
didn't exist. The signal turnaround delay indicated that it couldn't have been
much farther away than the synchsat belt, twenty-two thousand miles out. Hunt
had reasoned that it had to have been a relay device rather than a manned
vessel of some kind on the grounds that the premature termination pointed to
an experimental program still in its early days. Hunt, sure as hell, would
never have climbed into a conjuror's box like that, to be shot off into
another universe at that stage of the game. It seemed a fairly safe bet that
no other version of what was, after all, Hunt's same self would have, either.
Caldwell couldn't argue with that.
"Interfacing into the Terran comnet in the same way the Thurien relay
satellites that we've got now do," Hunt affirmed. That would have made the
device massive, though not necessarily huge in size. Information transfer into
and out of the realm used by the Thurien interstellar communications system,
referred to as h-space, was effected via spinning microscopic black-hole
toroids generated artificially. Putting them in orbit avoided the weight
problems that would have resulted from locating the equipment on the Earth's
surface. The various Terran outposts across the Solar System were being
equipped with Thurien relays as well. When the network was completed, it would
mean that a link from a UNSA base at Jupiter to Goddard, for example, could be
routed via the Thurien system, making communications turnaround delays of
hours or more a thing of the past.

"And the gist of what you . . . he, this other Hunt, whatever, had to say was
that Eesyan and his guys are going about it the wrong way," Caldwell went on.
"It needs a different kind of physics. The Multiverse is more like the JEVEX
computing matrix?"