"Edward M. Lerner - Part I of IV - A New Order of Things" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lerner Edward M)

it."

It was a partial victory, and for the wrong reasons, but Art was still satisfied. Once the UP military came
into the picture, risk assessment would surely receive a much higher priority.
****
So why are the Snakes--pardon me, the K'vithians--heading this way?

Eva knew Valhalla City from frequent stopovers. She found her way to the town's largest park, which the
community's liaison to the officious "environmental inspectors" had conveniently neglected to mention. An
engraved brass plaque at each entrance described how the former ice-mine tunnel had been lovingly
repurposed by the citizenry. Except for a few teens, whose nonstop conversation and easy laughter she
envied, she had the grove to herself.

Her solitude was sadly typical.

Eva's parents seemed never to tire of telling her, no matter how often she asked them not to, that she'd
been born brilliant and only gotten smarter. Mom and Dad, both academics, began her home schooling
while she was still a toddler. At age eight she met the first of a long line of tutors. Not until the
raging-hormone age of twelve, while plumbing new depths in quantum theory and insecurity, did she first
participate in a group educational setting. It did nothing for Eva's self-confidence that her
graduate-student "peers" were visibly fascinated and repulsed by her precociousness. Not until her
twenties did she find near-equals among people her own age. Very much the brilliant scientist her
well-intentioned parents had strived for, she did not see how she could have ended up with fewer social
skills had ineptitude been their primary goal.

Self-consciously self-isolated once more, she leaned against the bole of a magnolia tree in full bloom.
Art's question at the mission gathering--why Jupiter?--gnawed at her. His issue was a fair one: If the
starship was damaged and in need of fusion fuel, why not set the more energy-efficient course to Saturn?
He was correct that Saturn's atmosphere had essentially the same composition as Jupiter's.
Her puzzlement ran much deeper: She couldn't reconcile fusion power with a practical starship. It was
basic physics to calculate the energy needed to accelerate any mass to a given speed; moving a
habitat-sized mass between stars in any reasonable time took a lot of energy. Fusion sufficed for
interplanetary jaunts, but the energy density of its fuel was impractically low for interstellar travel.

She plucked nervously at a fallen twig taken from the packed dirt of the tunnel floor. A twentieth-century
dreamer named Bussard had envisioned a loophole: gathering with enormous magnetic fields the
incredibly diffuse matter, mostly hydrogen, found in interstellar space. He had imagined the hydrogen
serving both as energy source and propellant. No human engineer had ever figured out how to make that
work; conventional wisdom now had it the scoop's drag more than offset the energy value of any fuel
collected. Had the Snakes solved that problem? She didn't believe it. The approaching ship gave no hint
of the vast magnetic fields a fusion ramjet vehicle would deploy.

Bark shards fell as she peeled the twig. Art doubtless considered her professional interests highly
esoteric. If so, he would be only partially correct. She had been plucked, as she had truthfully told him,
from academia ... her other role, her occasional consulting to the UP peacekeeping establishment, she
was not free to discuss. That work had brought her to Jupiter system frequently in the past few years, for
a connecting flight from Callisto to a remote UP outpost.

The denuded, tortured twig sank slowly to the ground. Hard facts aside, she could not avoid the worry
that the Snakes' choice of destination related somehow to the top-secret matters taking place on Himalia.