"Procyon's Promise" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

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 probeТs 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 starshipТs 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
journeyТs 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.
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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 fromHenningТs Roost , and decelerating for rendezvous, when