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

Tom went inside his hut and span the metal cap off one of the cheap but decent bottles of vin de table
with which he generally started the evenings. He took a swig from it, looked around without much hope
for a clean glass, then took another swig. One handed, he tapped up the keys of one of his bank of
machines. Lights stuttered, cooling fans chirruped like crickets or groaned like wounded bears. It was hot
in here from all this straining antique circuitry. There was strong smell of singed dust and warm wires, and
a new dim fizzing sound which could have been a spark which, although he turned his head this way and
that, as sensitive to the changes in this room's topography as a shepherd to the moods of his flock, Tom
couldn't quite locate. But no matter. He'd wasted most of last night fiddling and tweaking to deal with the
results of a wine spillage, and didn't want to waste this one doing the same. There was something about
today, this not-Wednesday known as Thursday, which filled Tom with an extra sense of urgency. He'd
grounded himself far too firmly on the side of science and logic to believe in such rubbish as premonitions,
but still he couldn't help but wonder if this wasn't how they felt, the Hawkings and the Einsteins and the
Newtons-the Cooks and the Columbuses, for that matter-in the moment before they made their Big
Discovery, their final break. Of course, any such project, viewed with hindsight, could be no more than a
gradual accumulation of knowledge, a hunch that a particular area of absent knowledge might be fruitfully
explored, followed generally by years of arse-licking and fund-searching and peer-group head-shaking
and rejected papers and hard work during which a few extra scraps of information made that hunch seem
more and more like a reasonably intelligent guess, even if everyone else was heading in the opposite
direction and thought that you were, to coin a phrase once used by Tom's cosmology professor, barking
up the wrong fucking tree in the wrong fucking forest. In his bleaker moments, Tom sometimes wondered
if there was a tree there at all.

But not now. The data, of course, was processed automatically, collected day and night according to
parameters and wavelengths he'd pre-determined but at a speed which, even with these processors,
sieved and reamed out information by the gigabyte per second. He'd set up the search systems to flash
and bleep and make whatever kind of electronic racket they were capable of if they ever came upon any
kind of anomaly. Although he was routinely dragged from his bleary daytime slumbers by a surge in
power or a speck of fly dirt or rabbit gnawing the tripwires or a stray cosmic ray, it was still his greatest
nightmare that they would blithely ignore the one spike, the one regularity or irregularity, that might
actually mean something-or that he'd be so comatose he'd sleep though it. And then of course the
computers couldn't look everywhere. By definition, with the universe being as big as it was, they and
Tom were always missing something. The something, in fact, was so large it was close to almost
everything. Not only was there all the data collected for numerous other astronomical and
non-astronomical purposes which he regularly downloaded from his satellite link and stored on the disks
which, piled and waiting in one corner, made a silvery pillar almost to the ceiling, but the stars themselves
were always out there, the stars and their inhabitants. Beaming down in real-time. Endlessly.

So how to sort, where to begin? Where was the best place on all the possible radio wavelengths to start
looking for messages from little green men? It was a question which had first been asked more than a
century before, and to which, of all the many many guesses, one still stood out as the most reasonable.
Tom turned to that frequency now, live through the tripwires out on the karst, and powered up the
speakers and took another slug of vin de table and switched on the monitor and sat there listening,
watching, drinking. That dim hissing of microwaves, the cool dip of interstellar quietude amid the babble
of the stars and the gas clouds and the growl of the big bang and the spluttering quasars, not to mention
all the racket that all the other humans on earth and around the solar system put out. The space between
the emissions of interstellar hydrogen and hydroxyl radical at round about 1420 MHz. which was known
as the waterhole; a phrase which reflected not only the chemical composition of water, but also the idea
of a place where, just as the shy ibex clustered to quench themselves at dusk and dawn, all the varied
species of the universe might gather after a weary day to exchange wondrous tales.