"James P. Hogan - The Immortality Option" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

rotor housing dimly outlined in the gloom above. The party included an escort more as a matter of form
than from any real need for protection against anything. And the troopers were always happy to get
away from the base and see something new outside.
The beam from Crookes's flashlamp revealed pipes running across concrete foundations ahead,
with steel pillars and a construction going upward. To the left of the construction, cables radiated away
from an arrangement of protruding columns of stacked disks that looked like the insulators of a power
transformer. On the right, a pile of scrap overflowed from a recessed space beneath the concrete
foundation. A spindly six-legged machine that had been rooting with its tapered snout around the base of
the pile scampered away into the darkness.
"Watch yourself above, to the right," Armitage's voice warned through the speaker in Crookes's
helmet.
There was a piece of pipe sticking out with a valve on the end. "I see it," Crookes acknowledged.
The voice of Leon Keyhoe, the signals specialist accompanying Crookes, came over the circuit.
"How much farther to the tower? This is getting to be like an obstacle course across Osaka." Keyhoe
had put on weight during the voyage out from Earth with theOrion, and he sounded breathless even in
Titan's low gravity. Being cooped up in the base at "Genoa" for most of the time since the ship's
departure over two months previously hadn't helped matters.
"By my reckoning we should be practically there," Crookes answered.
"Men!" Amy Rhodes exclaimed as she followed Crookes over the wall of hydraulics couplings.
"Just no spirit of adventure, that's your problem. No wonder it took thousands of years for Earth to get
explored." Deigning to step down, she jumped the four feet from the top casing to the steel mesh plates
covering the ice below.
Crookes turned away to resume following Armitage and Franklin. Behind Rhodes, Keyhoe heaved
himself up and paused to wheeze for a moment before lowering himself down the other side of the
obstacle. He was followed by "Charlie Chan," the Taloid bringing up the rear, so called on account of
the golden hue of his metal hands and the facial parts not covered by his rough black hat and clothes of
what looked like tire tread and woven wire.
The closest they had been able to land the flyer had been about half a mile back, among the
remains of some kind of derelict construction beside the main conveyor line running through the area.
The flyer's two-man NASO crew and the party's other military escort had remained to guard the craftтАФ
necessary, since certain types of Titan's metal-searching animals had developed a liking for Terran alloys
тАФwhile the scientific party continued the rest of the way on foot.
The "tower" was in fact little more than a protuberance of girder frames capped by a circular
platform, standing thirty feet or so above the general level of the structures in the vicinity. What made it
interesting to communications engineers like Crookes and Keyhoe were the shapes on top that pictures
from low-flying reconnaissance drones had revealed, suggestive of communications antennas. The
pictures were low-resolution infrared, however, which made positive identification difficult, and no actual
transmissions had been detected. Hence, the only way to find out for sure what the shapes were had
been to go there and look.
If the whole Titan scene was indeed a result of some vast, alien, self-replicating industrial operation
gone wrong, as supposed, it seemed likely that it would originally have used radio communication. A
number of scattered and intermittent transmission sources existed, seeming to support such a conjecture,
and some of the Taloids possessed what appeared to be a residual reception capability by which they
could, on occasion, "hear" the transmissions. Traditionally, these latter were considered by the Taloids to
be mystics who interpreted voices from the deity.
The prevalent opinion among the Terran scientists was that radio had formed the primary means of
communication early on in the alien project but had become impracticable for some reason after the
whole scheme messed up. So the system had reverted to the backup communication modes that the
aliens would surely have provided if they had been any kind of engineers at all, and the isolated signals
still being picked up were simply a remnant of something that was in the process of dying out. Thus, the