"Smith, E E 'Doc' - SubSpace Vol 2 - Subspace Encounter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

"That's not much of a stretch, and you know it."

"Of itself, no; but there's a terrific snapper. No matter where they live-with so many of
them flitting around for so long a time, some of them-certainly the ones we
wrecked-would have normalized close enough to us to have been detected. Nothing ever
has; not even a bit of wreckage. Play that on your piccolo, Mare"
The girl caught her lower lip between her teeth. "Maybe some things have been seen . . .
some of those nonpsi sightings, you know . . . no, too vague, nothing tangible - typical
crackpot stuff." She pondered, then cried triumphantly, "But there could be a type that
lives in subspace."

"Oh, poppycock!" he snorted. "How far out into the wild blue can you go? If so, they'd be
incomprehensible by definition. Anyway, our generators are not designed to kill anything.
They don't generate death-rays. You know what the stuff is as well as I do."

"I know; but there's still the possibility of it making their drives backfire and kill everybody
aboard."

"Oh, for the love of . . . cut it, Man Get conscious and get with it."

"I am with it!" she insisted. "Making that assumption, the very least it would do would be
to . . ." She broke off and scowled in concentration, then went on, "Uh-uh. Assumption
untenable. Matter remains in subspace only under impressed force, so it would emerge .
. . and nothing ever has . . . but listen, Rod!" She stopped short; her eyes widened. "If
not in our space and not in subspace-what other space can there
Marrjyl of Orm was the first entity to have any inkling of the truth, but she was neither
willing nor able to support her theorizing against even mild opposition-and Rodnar's
opposition was anything but mild.
"Oh, stop blowing your nozzles and land somewhere," he exclaimed. "And think of this.
The most we'll be doing to them isn't a patch to the least those X-storms are doing to us.
Disruption of communications, business, time, money, tens of thousands of very
expensive com units and instruments. Don't be a weeper, Marr, especially since I am and
you ought to be pulling full weight with the Law on this project. Not only to keep from
being eaglemeat. either; this is the first chance
we've ever had and the best one we ever will have to ram psionics down the damned old
glumpfs' fat throats."

"On that you're clicking," she agreed. "Put that way, this kind of theorizing goes down the
cliff, we're certainly more important to us than any purely hypothetical entities can be,"
and nothing more was said about alien entities, intelligent or otherwise.

Space is unimaginably vast. Also, by the very nature of things, subspace is
incomprehensibly larger than is mere space. And one of the peculiarities of subspace is
that no two subspacers leaving the same place for the same destination ever do or ever
can take the same "course" unless they immerge at exactly the same time-at exactly the
same time, to within an immeasurably infinitesimal fraction of a nanosecond. Thus
Rodnar and Marrjyl did not find any subspace traffic lanes, there were none to find. And
thus their generators did not abort any X-storms-then.

And it was just as well for the peace of mind of all the humanity of the ninety-six planets