"Charles Stross - Missile Gap" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

тАЬWeтАЩll make good communists out of them eventually,тАЭ Yuri insists. тАЬA toast! To making good communists
out of little purple lizard-bastards with blowpipes who shoot political officers in the arse!тАЭ
Gagarin grins wickedly and Gorodin knows when heтАЩs being wound up on purpose and summons a twinkle to
his eye as he raises his glass: тАЬAnd to poisons that donтАЩt work on human beings.тАЭ




Chapter Seven: Discography
Warning:
The following briefing film is classified COLLECTION RUBY. If you do not possess both COLLECTION and
RUBY clearances, leave the auditorium and report to the screening security officer immediately. Disclosure to
unauthorized personnel is a federal offense punishable by a fine of up to ten thousand dollars and/or
imprisonment for up to twenty years. You have thirty seconds to clear the auditorium and report to the
screening security officer.
Voice-over:
OceanтАУthe final frontier. For twelve years, since the momentous day when we discovered that we had been
removed to this planar world, we have been confronted by the immensity of an ocean that goes on as far as
we can see. Confronted also by the prospect of the spread of Communism to uncharted new continents, we
have committed ourselves to a strategy of exploration and containment.
Film clip:
An Atlas rocket on the launch pad rises slowly, flames jetting from its tail: it surges past the gantry and
disappears into the sky.
Cut to:
A camera mounted in the nose, pointing back along the flank of the rocket. The ground falls behind, blurring
into blue distance. Slowly, the sky behind the rocket is turning black: but the land still occupies much of the
fisheye view. The first stage engine ring tumbles away, leaving the core engine burning with a pale blue flame:
now the outline of the California coastline is recognizable. North America shrinks visibly: eventually another,
strange outline swims into view, like a cipher in an alien script. The booster burns out and falls behind, and
the tumbling camera catches sunlight glinting off the upper-stage Centaur rocket as its engine ignites,
thrusting it higher and faster.
Voice-over:
We cannot escape.
Cut to:
A meteor streaking across the empty blue bowl of the sky; slowing, deploying parachutes.
Voice-over:
In 1962, this rocket would have blasted a two-ton payload all the way into outer space. That was when we
lived on a planet that was an oblate sphere. Life on a dinner-plate seems to be different: while the gravitational
attraction anywhere on the surface is a constant, we canтАЩt get away from it. In fact, anything we fire straight
up will come back down again. Not even a nuclear rocket can escape: according to JPL scientist Dan
Alderson, escape from a Magellanic disk would require a speed of over one thousand six hundred miles per
second. That is because this disk masses many times more than a starтАУin fact, it has a mass fifty thousand
times greater than our own sun.
What stops it collapsing into a sphere? Nobody knows. Physicists speculate that a fifth force that drove the
early expansion of the universeтАУthey call it тАШquintessenceтАЩтАУhas been harnessed by the makers of the disk.
But the blunt truth is, nobody knows for sure. Nor do we understand how we came hereтАУhow, in the blink of
an eye, something beyond our comprehension peeled the earthтАЩs continents and oceans like a grape and
plated them across this alien disk.
Cut to:
A map. The continents of earth are laid outтАУAmericas at one side, Europe and Asia and Africa to their east.