"Gregory Kern - Cap Kennedy 01 - Galaxy of the Lost" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kern Gregory)

"Manual?"

Saratov shook his head. "No."

"How can you be so certain?"

"This is a translated message, right?" He continued as Luden nodded.
'The signals are the standard automatic emission. A manually constructed
tape would have differences, more detailed information, the impact of the
personality of the sender. Whatever happened to those ships happened too
fast for such a tape to be made. Imagine the situation," he demanded.
"Something goes wrong with the ship. The captain does his best to remedy
the fault but fails. He decides to send out an emergency call and distress
signal. He cuts a tape giving all relevant data, hooks it to the transmitter,
and waits until either the ship dies or rescue arrives.

"The point I am making is this: No two men will ever cut a tape exactly
the same. And no man will ever cut a tape similar to the automatic relay."

Kennedy said, quietly, "Not even by intent?"

"Fake an automatic call?" Saratov shrugged. "It's possible, of course,
but it wouldn't be easy. Each vessel has an individual code impressed on
the auto-relay crystal which in turn is coupled to the drive and
life-support apparatus governed by the ship computer. To fake an
automatic call you'd have to determine precisely the ship-code impressed
on the crystal. To do that you'd have to dismantle the apparatus and,
unless you were very skilled and careful, the act of dismantling would
trigger the beacon. In any case, why bother? If you wanted to send out a
fake call, why not cut a tape?"

"Questions are not answers," snapped Luden. "But you have proved my
point. It would be too much trouble to fake a genuine, automatic beacon
signal, and it would be unnecessary when a taped call would have done as
well. Therefore, I contend the signals are genuine. The next point, of
course, is why, if the signals were genuine, the ship or traces of it were not
found? Commander Breson of MALAGA 7 is an experienced man. His
ships investigated the area within two days of the signal being received. If
he found nothing, then there was nothing to be found."

An interesting conclusion and one which Kennedy had considered. He
hadn't liked the inferences then and he didn't like them now. A wrecked
vessel was one thing. A ship, damaged, dying, which somehow vanished,
was another.

Saratov said thoughtfully, "An automatic signal is sent when the ship
computer decides that the vessel is at a point of nonfunctioning return.
The drive useless, for example, or the life-support system broken. The
damage, however, has to be both great and sudden, otherwise the crew
would be given the opportunity to effect repairs."