"Robert Reed - Eight Episodes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Robert)

three episodes arrived via the Web, bundled in a single
package. But it was this episode that effectively killed the
series. There were no explanations. Nothing showed but the
gray world spinning, twenty minutes before the point-of-view
gradually pulled away. The world was just a tiny speck of
metal lost in the vastness of space. For astronomers, it was a
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 Eight Episodes
by Robert Reed


fascinating momentтАФa vivid illustration that the universe
could be an exceedingly boring place. Stars were distant
points of light, and there was only silence, and even when
millions of years were compressed into a nap-length moment,
nothing was produced that could be confused with great
theatre.
But what the astronomers liked bestтАФwhat got the buzz
goingтАФwere the final few minutes of the episode. Chance
brought the tiny starship into the solar system, and chance
guided it past a younger Saturn. The giant moon, Titan,
swung close before the ship was kicked out to Neptune's
orbit. Then it drifted sunward again, Mars near enough to
reveal its face. Two hundred and fifty million years ago, Titan
was bathed in a much denser atmosphere, while Mars was a
temporarily wet world, heated by a substantial impact event.
Experts in those two worlds were impressed. Only in the last
year or two, probes had discovered what Invasion predicted
on its own, including pinpointing the impact site near the
Martian South Pole.
In much the same way, episode seven made the
paleontologists crazy.
With its long voyage finished, the tiny starship struck the
Earth's upper atmosphere, quickly losing its momentum as
well as a portion of its hull. The great southern continent was
rendered accurately enough to make any geologist smile,
while the little glimpses of Permian ecosystems were even
more impressive. Whoever produced the series (and there
was a growing controversy on that matter), they had known
much about protomammals and the early reptiles, cycads and
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 Eight Episodes
by Robert Reed


tree ferns. One ancient creatureтАФlizard in form, though not
directly related to any modern speciesтАФwas the only
important misstep. Yet five months later, a team working in
South Africa uncovered a set of bones that perfectly matched
what a vanished dramatic series had predicted ... and what