"Michael McCollum - Maker 2 - Procyion Promise" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

At the end of the twenty-first century, Andrea Sardi, EarthтАЩs most famous sociologist, published a
scientific paper that was to become her magnum opus. Her theory was that no human political, economic,
or religious institution survives longer than six generations, and that any evidence to the contrary is purely
an illusion. In support of her thesis, Mrs. Sardi pointed out that the United States of 2095 was not that of
1776, nor was the Catholic church of 1850 that of 850 AD

It was hardly surprising then - three hundred years afterPathfinder I departed the solar system - that
nearly everyone had given up the Procyon Expedition for dead. Of course, no one in the solar system
was in any position to ask the colonists what they thought of such reasoning. Nor had the tenth generation
of human beings to inhabit Alpha Canis Minoris VII (Alpha for short) studied the famous ladyтАЩs magnum
opus.

Not knowing any better, the colonists had built a society whose prime motivation was the completion of
the search that their forebears had begun. To an Alphan, the goal of faster-than-light travel was the
Holiest of all Grails.

Thus, the crewmen of StarshipProcyonтАЩs Promise approached the solar system with a strong sense of
destiny. Nowhere was the excitement more strongly felt than on the starshipтАЩs bridge. Captain Robert
Braedon sat in his command chair and listened to his crew chatter like children as they approached the
breakout point.

Braedon gazed upwards in thoughtful contemplation. The bridge was roofed over by a ten-meter
diameter, free blown bubble of armored glass that had been lovingly polished to optical perfection.
Beyond the glass was blackness - the fathomless, absolute black that accompanies flight at speeds
faster-than-light.

WhenPathfinder I entered the Procyon system, its crew found no trace of the far-flung FTL civilization
they expected. What the colonists did find - on an island continent in the northern hemisphere of
ProcyonтАЩs seventh planet - was a small exploration base. The starshipтАЩs wake detected byLife Probe
53935 had been that of a transient, an interloper climbing away from a minor outpost world, headed
toward an unknown destination somewhere farther in toward the galactic core.

When the first human landing boats descended from orbit, they touched down at the spaceport in the
midst of the deserted base. The creatures that had built the outpost were gone - fifty years gone to judge
by the yellow-green vegetation that choked the streets of their city. The city was a disappointment to the
colonists, merely a series of featureless foundations of vitrified rock that marked where dwellings had
once stood. The spaceport proved more useful. A large building, that the colonists tentatively identified as
a maintenance hangar, stood in the middle of the port; and near it, sat two globular starships.

Both hangar and starships proved to be little more than shells. The scars of cutting torches could be seen
everywhere. Gaping holes let sunlight shine through the shipsтАЩ hulls where plates had been removed. Yet,
despite their stripped condition, the two starships still contained a considerable quantity of alien
machinery. Sometimes the reason why a particular mechanism had escaped salvage was obvious - one
crystalline unit was half melted, another was buried deeply within a shipтАЩs oversize ribs. More frequently,
however, the colonists had no idea why the creatures that flew the starships left behind particular devices.

The colonists studied the hangar, the starships, and the few other clues the Star Travelers had left behind,
hoping to learn something of their precursors on Alpha. For two decades after their initial landing, the
colonyтАЩs scientists struggled to make sense of the equipment remnants remaining in the starships. For two
decades, they failed utterly. Then, when it seemed that they would never make any progress,