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

Such "possessed" JeveleneseтАФtaken over by Ent personalitiesтАФseemed also have
been at the root of the schism that subverted the Lunarian enterprise when it
had almost succeededтАФfifty thousand years before JEVEX even existed! How could
this possibly be?

Following from the earlier Ganymean spacecraft propulsion technology, the
Thurien interstellar transportation and communications web exploited
artificial manipulations of spacetime to bypass the restrictions of ordinary
space. The mathematics of the physics involved also admitted solutions that
implied the possibility of transfer through time. Since the Thuriens had never
been able to put a physical interpretation to this, they regarded it as no
more than a theoretical curiosity. But then, in the final stage of the
"Pseudowar" in which the Jevlenese believed themselves about to be assailed by
VISAR's imaginary Terran invasion fleet, their leadership attempted an escape
to a distant planet that they had secretly made into a fortress. When JEVEX
initiated creation of a transfer port to transport their ships, VISAR
intervened in a countermove to neutralize it. Nobody ever knew quite what
happened as the two supercomputers grappled across light-years for control of
the same knot of spacetimeтАФexcept that the fleeing Jevlenese craft were swept
into the convulsions. Afterward, all sign of them had vanished. Everywhere.

But the last images to be received from a surveillance probe that had clung in
pursuit showed they had rematerialized somewhere. There was a background of
stars. And there was a world. The world was Minerva, intact, as it had been.
The starfield showed the time to have been the late period of the Lunarians.
In fact, it was at just before the time when the Lambians adopted their
militant and uncompromising policy toward Cerios. This was surely too much to
have been a coincidence.

With Jevlen pacified and on probation while its population adjusted to life
undisturbed by the influence of the Ents, the scientists of Thurien and Earth
were free to turn their attention to the latest, and perhaps the most baffling
mystery of all. (See also the "Giants Chronology" compiled by Dr. Attila
Torkos, page 403.)


PART ONE: The Multiverse

CHAPTER ONE

The object appeared out of nowhere on the Earth-ward side of the Sun, roughly
halfway between the mean orbits of Earth and Mars. Its bulk ejected the flux
of solar-wind particles and cosmic-ray photons that happened to be occupying
the volume that it materialized in, and generated a mild gravitational ripple
fitting for its mass of several tens of thousand tons equivalent. But
otherwise, its arrival was as unremarkable as its appearance.

It was about the size of a domestic washing machine and vaguely cubical in
form, although any clear lines were lost in the profusion of antennas and