"Niven, Larry - Madness Has Its Place" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

Anton's Calvados was as special as he'd claimed, decades old and unique. He produced cheese and bread. Good thing: I was ready to eat his arm off. We managed to stick to harmless topics and parted friends.

The big catlike aliens had taken up residence in my soul.

Aliens aren't implausible. Once upon a time, maybe. But an ancient ETI in a stasis field had been in the Smithsonian since the opening of the twenty-second century, and a quite different creature - C. Cretemaster's real-life analog - had crashed on Mars before the century had ended.

Two spacecraft matching course at near lightspeed; that was just short of ridiculous. Kinetic energy considerations... why, two such ships colliding might as well be made of antimatter! Nothing short of a gravity generator could make it work. But Anton was claiming a gravity generator.

His story was plausible in another sense. Faced with warrior aliens, the ARM would do only what it could not avoid. They would build a gravity generator because the ARM had to control such a thing. Any further move was a step toward the unthinkable. The ARM took sole credit (and other branches of the United Nations also took sole credit) for the fact that man had left war behind. I shuddered to think what force it would take to turn the ARM toward war.

I would continue to demand proof of Anton's story. Looking for proof was one way to learn more, and I resist seeing myself as stupid. But I believed him already.

On Thursday we returned to Apt 2 3 309.

"I had to dig deep to find out, but they're not just sitting on their thumbs," he said. "There's a game going in Aristarchus Crater, Belt against flatlander. They're playing peace games."

"Huh?"

"They're making formats for contact and negotiation with hypothetical aliens. The models all have the look of those alien corpses, cats with bald tails, but they all think differently."

"Good." Here was my proof. I could check this claim.

"Good. Sure. Peace games." Anton was brooding. Twitchy. "What about war games?"

"How would you run one? Half your soldiers would be dead at the end... unless you're thinking of rifles with paint bullets. War gets more violent than that."

Anton laughed. "Picture every building in Chicago covered with scarlet paint on one side. A nuclear war game."

"Now what? I mean, for us."

"Yah. Jack, the ARM isn't doing anything to put the human race back on a war footing."

"Maybe they've done something they haven't told you about."

"Jack, I don't think so."

"They haven't let you read all their files, Anton. Two weeks ago you didn't know about peace games in Aristarchus. But okay. What should they be doing?"

"I don't know."

"How's your chemistry?"

Anton grimaced. "How's yours? Forget I said that. Maybe I'm back to normal and maybe I'm not."

"Yah, but you haven't thought of anything. How about weapons?

Can't have a war without weapons, and the ARM's been suppressing weapons. We should dip into their files and make up a list. It would save some time when and if. I know of an experiment that might have been turned into an inertialess drive if it hadn't been suppressed."

"Date?"