"Geoffrey A. Landis - Elemental (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

she could do was hope that when one of them finally managed to push her off
the narrow road, she could eject before the car started tumbling. II was a
long way down.
Somewhere between Naples and Pompeii the skies changed from the oppressive
gray clouds of the city into a brilliant sunshine.
"First, make a list, in order of correlation, of all activities or natural
phenomena occuring within one hundred kilos of the campus which match the
timing of the activity in your data," said Kirschmeyer.
"Right." Ramsey turned to the qwerty, started typing, paused for a second,
then typed fast. The viewscreen across from them lit up with a list. Both of
them studied it.
"Not much significance, is there?"
"Nein. Phone calls to Iceland; purchase of medical textbooks . . . look hard
enough and you'll find seeming correlations in any large enough set of random
events." He looked over at his pipe. "Tiburanaal." The pipe lit with a blue
spark. He picked it up and puffed thoughtfully. "Let's try another approach.
Your anomaly centers around Rome?"
"Closer to Naples."
"Okay. Try a correlation to activities there. "
"Data bank won't be as complete."
"Can you hook an Italian data bank?"
"I can try." He started typing.
"Got it," he said after a moment. The screen blanked and then lit up with a
shorter list.
"Jackpot! There's our correlation: launches from Napoli spaceport."
"Stimmt. Right enough. It accounts exactly for the sporadic signal, even for
the stopping thirty hours ago." Kirschmeyer paused and looked at Ramsey.
"Ramsey? Why did the spaceport stop launching thirty hours ago'?"
Ramsey typed the question into the computer. - 'Unscheduled maintenance,'
prof. Beats me why."
Professor Kirschmeyer looked up. "Ramsey, my friend, I am beginning to get
frightened."
"Why? Looks like I'm just picking up interference whenever they launch a shot
from Naples. Probably an electromagnetic pulse that just happens to resonate
my detector."
"Ah, my friend, I wish I had as little imagination as you. We still can't
account for why noise shows up as the signature of the elemental. Do me a
favor? Call up a plot of your magnetic anomaly, centered over a map of the
spaceport."
Ramsey did so. "Huh! Look at that. It's not even close to exactly centered on
the spaceport." He typed another command. "Center is . . . 23 kilometers off,
bearing 342 degress. Another
map . . . got it. It's centered on a frigging mountain. Vesuvius."
"As should have been obvious to me as soon as we agreed that it was indeed the
earth elemental we saw, not some random noise signal. Ramsey, a signal that
strong only could come from an earthquake or an active volcano."
"Active'? Isn't Mount Vesuvius extinct?"
"Dormant, my friend, only dormant. Sleeping. But 1 don't think it will stay
asleep for long."
"You think it's about to erupt'?"