"Jeffrey D. Kooistra - Dykstra's War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kooistra Jeffrey D)

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what? We're not in position to question what seems to them reasonableтАФwe know nothing about them.
To speculate will be utter waste of time!"

"I see no chains confining you to your seat, Dr. Manlinkov. Perhaps you would like to get back to your
investigations of the alien technology?"

Nachtegall struggled to keep from laughing. Dykstra had said the words so sincerely, but everyone knew
that Manlinkov had been working on the alien power supply, and getting nowhere, for months. He was
just being petty.

"Hmph!" Manlinkov said, and sat down.

Dykstra continued. "I think what Dr. Manlinkov is concerned about is that the aliens' failure to add
adjustable collimation may be like our reasons for not making every shotgun double-barreled.

"I am convinced that there's more to it than that.

"Suppose you were wandering the old West and you found what you thought was a six-shooter. Upon
closer inspection, you discover that the cylinder has only one chamber drilled in it. Now, the cylinder is
able to rotate, and there is ample room for five more chambers, and everything works exactly as a six-
shooter should, except for that deficit in the number of chambers.

"Clearly, adding five more chambers would make the gun a better weapon. So why didn't the maker do
it? Did he have some powerful reason for boring only one chamber? Or did it simply never occur to him
to bore five more?"

"That doesn't make sense," Major Moore called out. "How could anyone who could make the gun in the
first place be so stupid as to miss something like that?"

"I don't know," Dykstra said. "But consider this: Dr. Manlinkov mentioned that the aliens chose not to
add the variable collimation feature. Perhaps there was no choice involved at all."

***

"I don't know where I'm going, Chris," Nachtegall said. "They gave me the coordinates to some
anonymous rock no one's ever heard ofтАФbut no indication about what we're supposed to do there." They
were sitting in Dykstra's living room a day after the seminar.

"Did you meet any of your team yet?"

"Yes. Four are cybernetically enhanced commandos. The commander, Captain Reynolds, is made of


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some very fine steel indeed. The two other team members are medical doctors."