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

with dwindling resources at home and desperate to break free to the stars, they had hit upon the idea of
sending life probes to the surrounding stars to make contact with other advanced species. Once a probe
arrived in a strange stellar system, it bargained with its hosts to exchange their scientific knowledge for
that of the Makers. When it had learned all it could, the probe returned home to add its cargo to the
ever-growing pool of Maker knowledge. It was through this slow accumulation of the wisdom of many
races that the Makers hoped to eventually break free of the star that had become their jailer.

Over the centuries, thousands of life probes had been launched outbound from the Maker sun. They
cruised at speeds approaching ten percent that of light, taking centuries to complete their journeys. While
they traveled, they listened to the cosmos, ever alert for the energy discharges that betrayed the presence
of a technologically advanced civilization.
Life Probe 53935 had been unlucky. For ten millennia, it had searched for intelligence
among the stars and not found it. Even when it finally pricked an expanding bubble of human
radio noise, it was not sure that its luck had changed. For humankind was low on the Maker
scale of civilization, perhaps too low to be of use to a life probe in need of an overhaul. The
probe had considered the problem of human capabilities for months while it fell toward the
Sun. Finally, at almost the last moment possible, fate had intervened to make the probeтАЩs
decision for it.
One hypothesis common to all FTL theories was that a vessel traveling at superlight velocity would be
detectable in the sublight universe. Theoretically, any material object moving faster-than-light will create a
shock wave in the interstellar medium, a wave that appears to an outside observer as a source of highly
energetic, Cherenkov radiation.

For a hundred thousand years, the Makers and their far-flung probes had scanned the skies, searching
for just such a phenomenon. They had done so in vain until, in the human year 2065 AD, just as it was
approaching the solar system, the hyperwave detectors aboard Life Probe 53935 began clamoring for
attention. An intense source of radiation that closely mirrored the hypothetical properties of a starshipтАЩs
wake had been spotted in the Procyon system a mere twelve light-years beyond Sol. The age-old dream
of the Makers seemed finally at hand.

Except, there was a problem.

The struggle to climb to thirty thousand kilometers-per-second cruising velocity had cost the probe dearly
in terms of fuel. To slow its headlong rush at journeyтАЩs end would cost more, leaving its tanks virtually
dry. The probe had no fuel reserves with which to change course.

It studied its options carefully. The only sure way of reaching Procyon was a journey of two stages. The
first stage required stopping in the solar system to obtain new fuel stocks and a general overhaul of its
tired mechanisms. Once returned to a spaceworthy condition, the probe could launch outbound directly
for the Procyon system. The journey would last more than a century, but to a ten-thousand-year-old
machine, such a trip was a mere local jaunt.

Thus, humanity owed its first visitation from the stars not to any accomplishment of its own, but to the fact
that Earth was a natural way station on the way to more interesting vistas.

#

Chryse Haller sat at the controls of the rented daycruiser and finished off the sandwich she had made in
the tiny galley aft of the control room. She was some fifty-two hours out fromHenningтАЩs Roost , and
decelerating for rendezvous, when the shipтАЩs computer interrupted the soft music that filled the cabin.