"Spider Robinson - C8 - Callahan' s Key" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

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This one is for Guy Immesa




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK WOULD not have been possible without certain key speculations by cosmologists Alan Guth,
Sidney Coleman, and Sir Martin Rees, which I encountered in John Brockman's splendid book THE
THIRD CULTURE; my thanks to them for their unwitting assistance.
Possible or not, this book would have been much less plausible without the witting


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assistance of the following friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and kindly strangers: Guy Immega
(roboticist), Douglas Beder (physicist), David Sloan (physicist), Jaymie Matthews
(astrophysicist), Jef Raskin (interface expert; chief designer for the Macintosh), Douglas Scott
(cosmologist), Michael Spencer (blacksmith; philosopher), Bill McCutcheon (astrophysicist), David
Measday (astrophysicist), Joseph Green (writer; NASA alumnus), the uncredited creators of the NASA
website, Dean Ing (writer; auto designer/builder; military aviation expert) Laurence M. Jamfer
(writer; polymath), Ben Bova (writer; space travel expert), Douglas Girling (systems analyst;
aerospace expert), Ed Thelen (Internet Nike expert), and Ted Powell (programmer; cyberhistorian;
skeptic).
And those are just the people who helped with the science component of this story! (Any
errors arising from my misunderstanding of what they told me are, of course, all their fault, for
not explaining it better.)
Other invaluable assistance, advice, inspiration, or permission to quote was provided by
Spider John Koemer (musician), Don Ross (musician), the Beatles (the Beatles), David Gerrold
(writer; cat servant), Stephen Gaskin (hippie; writer; Head Judge for the first and second annual
International Cannabis Cup competitions in Amsterdam), Virginia Heinlein (retired naval officer;
biochemist; widow of Robert A. Heinlein), Lord Buckley (saint), Will Soto (tightrope-walking
juggler), the Key West Cultural Preservation Society and just about every Key West local I've ever
met. Special thanks must go to the superb Key West writer Laurence Shames, whose contribution to
this story (like those of Rees, Guth, and Coleman, above) was crucial, although quite unwitting.
And my ongoing gratitude goes to the alt.callahans Usenet newsgroup, for keeping me grounded.
All their efforts-and any efforts of my own-would have come to naught without the massive
ongoing love and support of my cherished wife Jeanne. . . or the acumen of my agent Eleanor Wood .
. . or the sagacity and kindness of my editor Patrick LoBrutto, who found several structural
defects and showed me how to fix them. And my friend Ted Powell deserves a second mention here,
for his work as volunteer creator and keeper of my website (which can be found at
http://psg.com/~ted/spider/).
Another second mention, and credit where it's due: the new name that Doc Webster suggests
for gamma-ray bursters, herein, is my own invention. . . but the exquisite topper Mei-Ling comes