"Antares - 02 - Antares Passage" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

"Good to be home," he replied with his nose nestled in her fragrant hair. After
a long moment in which no one spoke, they released each other by mutual consent.
Drake sighed deeply and said, "Well, shall we go in search of the rest of my
luggage?"
"Suits me," Bethany replied.
They avoided the slidewalk, preferring to walk arm in arm down the long
concourse. Drake found himself whistling under his breath. As they walked, he
became aware of the warmth of her beside him, and of the general acuteness of
his senses. He watched the bustle around him with newly sharpened vision.
Overhead were several large holoscreens. Some were used to display launching and
arrival information; others directed travelers to various destinations within
the spaceport, while still others displayed the latest news concerning the
recently completed election. Drake ignored the latter. He'd had all the "news"
he cared for on the long flight down from Felicity Base.
They came to the end of the concourse and turned left into the main section of
the spaceport terminal building. A large holocube stood at the point where
several slidewalks spilled their loads into the cavernous terminal. Inside the
cube stood a creature from out of a nightmare.
#
The basis for interstellar travel was established by Bashir-ben-Sulieman in
2078. Sulieman, an astronomer working out of Farside Observatory, Luna, spent
his life measuring the precise positions and proper motions of several thousand
stars. After two decades of work, he reluctantly concluded that existing
gravitational theories did not adequately explain the placement of various stars
within the galactic spiral arm of which Sol is a member. Sulieman became
convinced that space is not only curved locally around planetary and stellar
masses as Einstein had maintained, but that it is also folded back upon itself
in long lines stretching across thousands of light-years. He theorized that
these foldlines originate in the massive black hole that occupies the center of
the galaxy, and that they stream outward in complex patterns along the spiral
arms. He further theorized that whenever such a foldline encounters a star, it
is focused much as a lens focuses a beam of light; and if that focus is
sufficiently sharp, a weak spot, or foldpoint, appears in the fabric of the
space-time continuum.
Twenty years after Sulieman's revelation, scientists positioned a spaceship
within one of the two foldpoints known to exist within the Solar System and
released copious quantities of energy in a precisely controlled pattern. The
energy release caused the ship to be instantaneously transported along the
foldline to the system of Luyten's Star, some 12.5 light-years distant from Sol.
There was no holding the human race back after that. Over the next several
centuries, the leakage of population into space became a flood. The pattern of
the migration was determined almost entirely by the shape of foldspace, as the
aggregate of foldlines and foldpoints came to be called. While some stars were
found to possess only a single foldpoint, others were endowed with two, three,
or more. The biggest, most massive stars were found to be especially fertile
centers of foldpoint production; and therefore, the systems of these stars
became the crossroads of interstellar travel. The red-orange supergiant star
Antares was the champion foldpoint producer throughout human space. Its six
interstellar portals made Antares the linchpin of a network of related star
systems known collectively as the Antares Foldspace Cluster.