"Geoffrey A. Landis - Impact Parameter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

Impact Parameter
by Geoffrey A. Landis
1. Parameters of the Problem

The terminal whistled for his attention, a theme by Paganini in E-flat. Ben got up and stretched, trying to
clear the fuzz out of his brain. He hadn't even realized he had been napping. It seemed that he was just
about to say something to Barbara, something important, and now he had forgotten what it was. He
shook his head and smiled as he walked over to the coffee pot. He hadn't been married to her for well
over five years.

It was almost four in the morning. His guaranteed-observer time, two hours on the three-meter gamma
ray observatory, came when scheduling bureaucrats said it came, not when it was convenient.
Smooth-talking astronomers with billions in grant money and lecture fees got the convenient times. With
the low priority and ragged funding of Ben's project, he was lucky to get on the GO list at all.

Time to get moving. He started the coffee dripping and went to his computer. While the previous run was
finishing, he put a request into the satellite's command queue for it to locate and lock onto his guide stars
with the finder scope. He pulled the celestial coordinates out of disk and uplinked them to the satellite,
then sat back to wait.

As soon as he leaned back in the chair, Rajiv walked in. Ben looked at the clock. Four on the nose.
"Right on time."

"We are working together so long, are you still thinking I would be late?"

"You, late? Never."

The console whistled again, a theme from Paderewski in a minor key. He looked at the message. The
computer had found his guide stars, but one of them was not quite in the position he had specified. He
downlinked a visual. There was his guide star, Omicron Ceti, with the reticule showing its starchart
position in the center of the screen. The star was noticeably off the crosshairs -- five microradians, maybe
more. Ben pounded his fist on the console. "Damn you, why can't you work right just one time, just one
lousy time?"

"What is the problem?" asked Rajiv.

"Damn star in the wrong place."

"Oh, but that is not possible, surely, no? How could a star be moving places?"

"Oh, the star's in the same old place, Raj, you can bet on it. The damn satellite is out of alignment." Most
likely the satellite position sensors had drifted again.

Rajiv frowned. "We will be recalibrating? Or perhaps we just observe and let the maintenance people do
their job on their own shift?"

Ben looked at the schedule. Recalibrating would take half an hour, a good quarter of his week's
observing time, and it wasn't his job. The maintenance and calibration people had huge blocks of time,
why couldn't they do their job right? Damn it, the telescope had been calibrated just three days ago. It
wasn't fair. Every instinct told him to let it slide, to let somebody else do it. His project didn't require