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

They gave up on towed sonar after losing two rigs in the trees along the shoreline. Recon satellites had
performed various kinds of imaging and discovered a significant gravitational anomaly at the bottom of
Emerald Lake. Or maybe they hadn't. The dimple in the lake surface was caused by the stress of the
anomaly. Or maybe not.

There wasn't a ferrous body in the lake, but a significant mass concentration rested on the bottom,
absorbing radar and creating weird thermal gradients. Wild theories were thrown around concerning
polymerization of water, stress on molecular bonds, microscopic black holes, time singularities, and so
on. There was some hard data about a heat rise in the center of the dimple, a heat rise that declined in
temperature during the first three weeks of observation before leveling out about nine degrees centigrade
above historical ambient surface temperature.

Curiously, remote sensing indicated ice at the bottom of the lake in the area of the dimple. Cameras and
instrument packages sent down didn't add much to the pictureтАФthe mascon was big, it was inert, and it
distorted the lake's temperature profile.

But then the search for additional meaningful data was complicated by the one incontrovertible thing
discovered besides the heat rise: radioactive contamination. Everyone working at the lake was being
exposed to radionuclides equivalent to three hundred rem a year, sixty times the permitted exposure level
for workers in the United States. Well into cancer-causing territory, especially leukemia, but not enough
to give you an immediate case of the pink pukes or make your hair fall out.

When I heard, I sought out the CSA project manager in charge of the current phase of the investigation,
Ray Vittori. I was no physicist, but I'd been a technology spook for years. This stank. "How in holy hell
could you not have noticed this before?"

Vittori shook his head. "It wasn't here before, Diedrich. Simple."

I crossed my arms. Behind me, I thought I could feel Kelly Maclnnes smile, but I didn't bother to turn
around to see if I was right. She mistrusted government institutions, including her own, but she loathed the
United States government.

As it was, we couldn't justify trucking the required diving equipment, mini-subs, and underwater
instrumentation high into the Canadian Rockies to find out more about the dimple. So much data had
already been collected that it would take years to analyze it in the first place. And the anomaly didn't
seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. The radiation levels just complicated whatever case I might
have made for increased allocation of intelligence assets.

The Orion went back to hunting subs in the maritime provinces. The think tanks went back to thinking
somewhere else. Some cameras and sensors remained, wired in around the lakeshore, shooting telemetry
back to my agency in Maryland. Other than that, only the satellites still provided us with information,
along with the occasional research team willing to sign their souls away in indemnity clauses. A
bare-bones contingent continued to secure the perimeters of the park, all volunteer agents at exorbitant
pay for assurances that they wouldn't seek damages if they ever showed signs of sickness that could be
attributed to radiation.

By the time the first snow fell, I was left alone to observe the astonishing natural beauty of Yoho National
Park and the equally attractive Mrs. Kelly Maclnnes. Just me, after all the attention and the hardware
went away, with a dosimeter, a sixteen-foot bass boat, and lots of time.