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

was already a cultish buzz grew into a wild, increasingly
public cacophony....
At least forty thousand sitesтАФchat rooms and blogs and
suchтАФwere dedicated to supporting the same inevitable
conclusion.
By means unknown, aliens had sent a message to
earthlings, and it took the form of Invasion of a Small World.
****


The eighth episode was a genuine treasure.
Dr. Smith reappeared. Several years older, divorced and
with his belly fat stripped off by liposuction, he was shown
wandering happily through a new life of endless celebrity. His
days and long evenings were spent with at least three
mistresses as well as a parade of world leaders. Accustomed
to the praise of others, he was shown grinning confidently
while offering his interpretations of the ancient message. The
universe was almost certainly sprinkled with life, he
explained. But despite that prolificacy, the cosmos remained
an enormous, very cold, and exceptionally poor place. The
gulfs between living worlds were completely unbridgeable. No
combination of raw energy and questing genius could build a
worthy stardrive. Moreover, even direct communication
between local species was rarely worth its considerable cost,
13
 Eight Episodes
by Robert Reed


since civilizations rarely if ever offered each other anything
with genuine worth.
"Technology has distinct limits," he warned the starlets
and world leaders that he met at cocktail parties. "Humans
are already moving into the late stages of scientific endeavor.
What matters most, to us and to any wise species, is the
careful shepherding of energy and time. That is why we must
care for our world and the neighboring planets inside our own
little solar system. We must treasure every day while wasting
nothing, if only to extend our histories as far as into the
future as possible."
"That strikes me as such depressing news," said one prime
ministerтАФa statuesque woman blessed with a starlet's
beautiful face. "If there really are millions and billions of living
worlds, as you claim, and if all the great minds on all of those
worlds are thinking hard about this single problem, shouldn't
somebody learn how to cheat the speed of light or create free
energy through some clever trick?"
"If that were so," Dr. Smith replied, "then every world out
there would be alive, and the giant starships would arrive at