"Jay Lake & Ruth Nestvold - The Canadian Who Came Almost All the Way Back from the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

college, where they both studied astrophysics, but her name had never been on any of his papers or
patents. They asked her the questions anyway.

And now it was my turn, on behalf of the NSA. We still didn't know what had happened out there in that
lake, but we wanted to make sure no one else knew either. The first step had been to clear out the
parkтАФexcept for Kelly Maclnnes. My job wasn't as much to drag information out of her as it was to
make sure it didn't get to anyone else first if she was moved to start talking.

She stared out at the hole in the water, the unfilled grave of her absent husband. "He's not dead."

I nodded. "I've read the transcriptsтАФit's clear to me you believe that." Or at least you claim you do.
"But, Mrs. Maclnnes, there is no evidence your husband survived his rather spectacular departure from
earth six years ago."

She hugged her plaid flannel jacket closer, her gaze drifting up to the sky. Despite the sun, the air was
crisp. "The trip was supposed to take less than a week. Then six years after he left, he called and told me
to meet him here. Just after 2:30 a.m. on April seventeenth, the center of the lake collapsed into that hole.
That's what I know, Mr. Diedrich."

I followed her stare toward the summer sky. Somewhere behind that perfect blue shell was an
explanation for what happened to Nicholas Maclnnes.

Too bad the sky wasn't talking today.

Barnard's Star is slightly less than six light-years from Sol. A red dwarf, it is interesting only for its
convenient position in the interstellar neighborhood and the fact that it is moving noticeably faster than any
of our other stellar neighbors. Until Nick Maclnnes decided to go there six years ago.

Four years prior to his launch, he'd published a paper in the Canadian Journal of Aerospace
Engineering and Technology Applications, "Proposal for a Cost-Effective Method of Superluminal
Travel." CJAETA was about one step above vanity publishing, and the article was soon well on its way
to the dustbin of history.

Recently, I had seen to it that all copies of Volume XXXVI, Issue 9, had been destroyed, along with
computer files, Web sites, mirror sites, tape backups, printer plates, CD-ROMs, library microfiche
archives, and everything else we could think of. Because one fine spring day, Nick Maclnnes, sometime
mobile communications billionaire, made a space shot from a privately built and previously unknown
launch site on the prairie east of Calgary, found his way into orbit on top of surplus Russian missile
hardware, and did something that crashed a significant portion of the world's electronic infrastructure. At
which point, he disappeared in a rainbow-colored flash visible across an entire hemisphere of the planet.

It soon became known that he was carrying four surplus Russian M-2 nuclear warheads. "For the
bomb-pumped lasers/' the Ph.Ds assisting Maclnnes said, as if the rest of the world were worrying
excessively over trivialities.

When I returned to Emerald Lake three months later to check on Kelly Maclnnes and security at the
park, the Canadian Air Force and NASA were back. The CAF had flown a Lockheed Orion P-3C AIP
over the lake back in late April and through most of May.

Now, in October, NASA and the Canadian Space Agency had stuck some added instrumentation on it.