"Oltion-PyramidHoax" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

David winced. "Straight at it? You know how close we'd have to get before the
navcom could get a fix on the pattern?"

Muriel tipped the plane over in a slow barrel roll. "Hey, you forget who's
flying this thing. We can do it."

David looked out at the pyramid doing its pirouette around them. Shaking his
head, he said, "The things I do for the space program."

The next night came far too quickly. They arrived back at base from their first
night just in time to take off for the next day's mapping flight over Xanthe, so
they were pumping stimulants most of the day just to stay awake. On top of that,
David had to spend most of his time in the cramped equipment bays in the wings
to either side of the cabin, hooking the uplink motor to the spectrometer laser
and patching the navigation computer into the system.

They landed at their base camp just before nightfall and made a show of getting
ready early for bed, then as soon as they'd shut off the lights they jumped up
and snuck out of the dome like teenagers heading to a party. Muriel flew at top
speed toward Cydonia while David recalled the photos of the lines they'd drawn
the night before and fed them into the navcom's pattern recognition buffer.

"All right," Muriel said when the first triangular peak slid up over the
horizon. "Lock onto the west side of number one; we might as well make our first
run count."

"Ready here," David replied.

Muriel slowed the plane to just above stall speed--still almost the speed of
sound -- and lined it up so they were flying directly toward the pyramid. They
watched it grow larger and larger, waiting nervously for the navcom to recognize
it and lock on.

"Come on," David pleaded. "Find the son of a bitch!"

The wall eclipsed nearly half the sky before Muriel banked hard to the left and
pulled back on the stick, shoving the throttles forward at the same time to keep
them from stalling out. The pyramid slid past only meters below.

"Why didn't it lock on?" she asked.

David was still staring straight ahead. "Because there weren't any lines there
for it to lock onto," he replied softly.

"What? There had to be. We marked every side of every damned pyramid in Cydonia
last night."

He looked over at her. "Well we must have missed this one, because I guarantee
you, I'd have seen a paper cut if there'd been one."