"Nancy Kress - Saviour" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

irregularity lay. Not humming or moving, or, in fact, doing anything at all.

He put out his hand to touch it, and the hand stopped nearly a foot away.

"Jim!" Ann called, and somebody elseтАФmust be KleinschmidtтАФsaid, "Herr Dr
Cowell!" Cowell moved his hand along whatever he was touching. An invisible wall,
or maybe some sort of hard field, encased the craft.

"Hello, ship," he said softly, and afterwards wasn't ever sure if he'd said it aloud.

"Don't touch it! Wait!" Ann called, and her hand snatched away his.

It didn't matter. He turned to her, not really seeing her, and said something that, like
his greeting to the ship, he wasn't ever sure about afterwards. "I was raised
Orthodox, you know. Waiting for the Messiah," and then the rest were on them, with
helicopters pulsing overhead and soldiers ordering everyone back, back I said! And
Cowell was pushed into the crowd with no choice except to set himself to wait for
the visitors to come out.

****

"Are you absolutely positive?" the president, who was given to superlatives, asked
his military scientists. He had assembled them, along with the joint chiefs of staff, the
cabinet, the Canadian lieutenant-governor, and a sprinkling of advisers, in the cabinet
room of the White House. The same group had been meeting daily for a week, ever
since the object had landed. Washington was warmer than Minnesota; outside,
dahlias and chrysan-themums still bloomed on the manicured lawn. "No signal of
any type issued from the craft, at any time after you picked it up on the Hubble?"

The scientists looked uncomfortable. It was the kind of question only non-scientists
asked. Before his political career, the president had been a financier.
"Sir, we can't say for certain that we know all types of signals that could or do exist.
Or that we had comprehensive, fixed-position monitoring of the craft at all times. As
youтАФ"

"All right, all right. Since it landed, then, and you got your equipment trained on it.
No radio signals emanating from it, at any wavelength whatsoever?"

"No, sir. That's definite."

"No light signals, even in infrared or ultraviolet?"

"No, Mr President."

"No gamma lengths, or other radioactivity?"

"No, sir."

"No quantum effects?" the president said, surprising everyone. He was not noted for
his wide reading.