"Ian R. Macleod - New Light On The Drake Equation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

"Not really, Tom, but I'd sat through a whole bloody lecture of the stuff that morning, and I'd decided I'd
had enough of it-of any kind of fiction. I realized I wanted something that was fabulous, but real."

"That's always been a tall order тАж" Terr had been so lovely back then. That blue coat, the shape of her
lips on the wineglass she'd been drinking. Those stormy green eyes. Fabulous, but real. But it was like the
couple he'd seen that morning. What had she ever seen in him?

"But then you told me you planned to prove that there was other intelligent life in the universe, Tom. Just
like that. I don't know why, but it just sounded so wonderful. Your dream, and then the way you could
be so matter-of-fact about it тАж"

Tom gripped his glass a little tighter, and drank the last of it. His dream. He could feel it coming, the next
obvious question.

"So did it ever happen?" Terr was now asking. "Did you ever find your little green men, Tom? But then I
suppose I'd have heard. Remember how you promised to tell me? Or at least it might have roused you to
post some news on that poor old website of yours." She chuckled with her changed voice, slightly
slurring the words. But Terr, Tom remembered, could get drunk on half a glass of wine. She could get
drunk on nothing. Anything. "I'm sorry, Tom. It's your life, isn't it? And what the hell do I know? It was
one of the things I always liked about you, your ability to dream in that practical way of yours. Loved
тАж"

Loved? Had she said that? Or was that another blip, stray data?
"So you must tell me, Tom. How's it going? After I've come all this way. You and your dream."

The candle was sinking. The stars were pouring down on him. And the wine wasn't enough, he needed
absinthe-but his dream. And where to begin? Where to begin?

"D'you remember the Drake Equation?" Tom asked.

"Yes, I remember," Terr said. "I remember the Drake Equation. You told me all about the Drake
Equation that first day on our walk from that pub тАж" She tilted her head to one side, studying the
glimmer of Aries in the west as if she was trying to remember the words of some song they'd once
shared. "Now, how exactly did it go?"

Until that moment, none of it had yet seemed quite real to Tom. This night, and Terr being here. And, as
the candle flickered, she still seemed to twist and change from Terr as he remembered to the Terr she
was now in each quickening pulse of the flame. But with the Drake Equation, with that Tom Kelly was
anchored. And how did it go, in any case?



┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖



That long and misty afternoon. Walking beside the canal towpaths from that pub and beneath the
dripping tunnels and bridges all the way past the old factories and the smart houses to the city's other
university out in Edgbaston as the streetlights came on. He'd told Terr about a radio astronomer named
Frank Drake who-after all the usual false alarms and funding problems which, even in its embryonic stage