"Michael Swanwick - Slow Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

response is transmitted as one take, so if you flub a line,
we'll have to go back to the beginning and start all over
again."
"Yeah, yeah," Consuelo grumbled.
"We've done this before," Lizzie reminded him.
"Okay. Here's the first one."
 _"Uh, hi, this is BladeNinja43. I was wondering just
what it is that you guys are hoping to discover out there."_
"That's an extremely good question," Alan lied. "And
the answer is: We don't know! This is a voyage of discovery,
and we're engaged in what's called 'pure science.' Now, time
and time again, the purest research has turned out to be
extremely profitable. But we're not looking that far ahead.
We're just hoping to find something absolutely unexpected."
"My God, you're slick," Lizzie marveled.
"I'm going to edit that from the tape," Alan said
cheerily. "Next up."
_"This is Mary Schroeder, from the United States. I
teach high school English, and I wanted to know for my
students, what kind of grades the three of you had when you
were their age."_
Alan began. "I was an overachiever, I'm afraid. In my
sophomore year, first semester, I got a B in Chemistry and
panicked. I thought it was the end of the world. But then I
dropped a couple of extracurriculars, knuckled down, and
brought that grade right up."
"I was good in everything but French Lit," Consuelo
said.
"I nearly flunked out!" Lizzie said. "Everything was
difficult for me. But then I decided I wanted to be an
astronaut, and it all clicked into place. I realized that,
hey, it's just hard work. And now, well, here I am."
"That's good. Thanks, guys. Here's the third, from
Maria Vasquez."
_"Is there life on Titan?"_
"Probably not. It's _cold_ down there! 94 degrees
Kelvin is the same as -179 degrees Celsius, or -290 degrees
Fahrenheit. And yet ... life is persistent. It's been found
in Antarctic ice and in boiling water in submarine volcanic
vents. Which is why we'll be paying particular attention to
exploring the depths of the ethane-methane sea. If life is
anywhere to be found, that's where we'll find it."
"Chemically, the conditions here resemble the anoxic
atmosphere on Earth in which life first arose," Consuelo
said. "Further, we believe that such prebiotic chemistry has
been going on here for four and a half billion years. For an
organic chemist like me, it's the best toy box in the
Universe. But that lack of heat is a problem. Chemical
reactions that occur quickly back home would take thousands
of years here. It's hard to see how life could arise under