"Sean McMullen - Souls in the Great Machine" - читать интересную книгу автора (McMullen Sean)

The lunar surface was the familiar jumble of craters and mountains,
along with a faint tracery of ancient strip mines. A few deft twists
detached the standard eyepiece, but her own array of lenses and caliper
screws took longer to install and adjust. The clock rang out the tenth
hour past noon. The moon was 5 degrees above the horizon when she
finished.

The increased magnification gave a washed-out image that danced in the
air currents. Because the moon was a little past full there were
shadows near the edge, exactly where she needed them. She adjusted
movable crosshairs within her eyepiece, glanced at the clock, then
measured the length of a shadow cast by the cut of a strip mine. She
gasped, then fought down her excitement.

She repeated the measurement, then made it again with her other eye.
The readings were identical. The clock announced 10:15. She scrawled
down the figures selected another shadow, and took more measurements.
By 10:30 the elevation was nearly 10 degrees. Time seemed to
accelerate as she measured a third strip's shadow--and suddenly one of
the wheels raising the telescope reached its maximum elevation and
jammed. The vista of lunar strip mines slid out of the field of the
eyepiece.

She was aching to look back to her measurements as she lowered the tele
scope, reinstalled the standard eyepiece, and focused on the beam flash
gallery at the summit of the Numurkah tower. Some rough calculations
verified what she had already worked out in her head: the first of the
three strips that she had measured was significantly deeper than it had
been a year ago.

With a final glance around the beam flash gallery, she left for the
stairwell and began the long descent. All the way down, her mind was
racing with the implications of a 5 percent deepening in a scratch on
the lunar surface. Walking into the deserted streets of the river
port, she paused to look up at the moon. It was such a momentous
discovery, yet she could tell no one. Her entire life was becoming a
catalogue of secrets she could not share.

"Fantastic, even after two thousand years their machines still work,"
Zarvora Cybeline said aloud; then she turned to the jumble of moonlit
buildings that was the Echuca Unitech's library. "Time to build my own
machine."
CHAMPIONS

Fergen had not noticed a suspicious pattern in the pieces on the board
by the seventh move. Champions was his best game and he had even its
most exotic strategies and scenarios memorized. The Highliber advanced
a pawn to threaten his archer. The move was pure impudence, a lame
ploy to tempt him to waste the archer's shot. He moved the archer to
one side, so that his knight's flank was covered.