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

sensor appendages cluttered untidily on all its sides. For a while it hung in
space, sampling and processing information from its surroundings and sending
its findings back to the realm from whence it had come. Then, as suddenly as
it had arrived, it vanished again.
Its corrected position put it inside the Moon's orbit, approximately
twenty-two thousand miles above the Earth's surface in the belt used by
synchronous communications satellites. One more relocation, and it was in
place to intercept the beam from the comnet ground station in Maine, which
handled one of the primary trunk routes into the USA. The alien device
connected into the system using standard Terran communications protocols and
transmitted the phone number of the UN Space Arm's Advanced Sciences Division
at the Goddard Center in Maryland, one of the homes of what had been NASA in
years gone by.
***

In a neighborhood bar called Happy Days, a few miles from Goddard, Dr. Victor
Hunt leaned back in a corner booth by the window and took in the scene. It was
a sunny Saturday morning in June. People were making the best of the fine
weekend. Across the aisle, three men who had pulled up earlier in a pickup
loaded with timber were downing some preventative thirst medicine on what
looked like their way to a home remodeling project. Some younger people at the
far end were working up enthusiasm in advance for the Baltimore Orioles versus
Atlanta Braves game due to be played later. A couple sat holding hands across
one of the tables, blissfully unaware of anything else.

For Hunt, the snatched moment of relaxation was a rare luxury. His position as
Deputy Director for Physics of UNSA Advanced Sciences put him at the center of
the effort to assimilate Thurien scientific knowledge without disrupting
Earth's social and economic structure. Already, some of the most cherished
notions once believed to be permanently beyond questioning had been consigned
to oblivion. The whole system of values that most had considered as
constituting the inescapable underpinnings of commerce and production was
having to be rethought in the light of the Thurien existence, proof that
deeper, less adversarial ways of motivating creativity and cooperation were
possible. Nobody knew what the next ten or twenty years might bring.
Paradoxically, for the majority of people this all added up to carrying on
more or less as normal. The gigantic forces now in motion that would change
all their lives irreversibly were beyond any ability of theirs to control.

A swarthy figure sporting a shaggy mustache and wearing a bright scarlet shirt
and shorts turned from the bar and came over, bearing two pint glasses of
black, creamy-headed Guinness. Jerry Santello was Hunt's neighbor from the
adjacent apartment unit in a landscaped residential development on the edge of
town. They had come out for some refreshment after a morning workout at the
complex's gym. Jerry deposited the glasses on the table, pushed one across,
and sat back down on the seat opposite.

"Cheers," Hunt acknowledged, raising his in salutation as he picked it up.

Jerry took a draft and licked his lips. "I'd never have believed it. I'm