"George Zebrowski - Stranger Suns" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zebrowski George)

He pushed over to the other side of the tube, and watched the regular shuttle dumping its
hundred-thousand-pound load of radioactive waste into the last containment sphere. When it was sent on
its way into the Sun, they would start filling the zero-g work spheres, which were now too old to
renovate.

He grasped the center bar again and pulled himself forward toward the door to the control room. Get a
grip on yourself, he told himself as he reached it and pressed his palm to the key plate. We're all good
people up here. Hard workers, all ten of us. Better times may come.

The door lurched ajar, then slid open. He pulled himself inside, and tried to seem cheerful as he came up
behind the stocky figure of his friend.

Malachi Moede turned from the control panel and said, тАЬJust about ready to use again."

Juan smiled. Malachi floated up, slipped a smoke from the pack in his shirt pocket, and scratched the
cigarette on the low ceiling. The tip glowed red against his black skin as he took a drag, then exhaled
toward the ventilator intake. тАЬI'm quite sure it will work perfectly,тАЭ he said in his subdued British accent,
which made even his most pointed remarks seem understated.

Juan recalled again how often he had been reminded that his detector was not relieving the choke below
or opening Sunspace for industrial development. The complaints reminded him of his dead father, who
would have said that his son had built a toy with other people's money for his own amusement. тАЬMaybe
we'll skip a few growing pains if this rig puts us in touch with our alien brethren.тАЭ The bitter disbelief in his
own voice disturbed him.

Malachi took a deep drag and held the smoke for a moment before releasing it toward the grille.
тАЬPossibly the tachyon beams are very tight and miss our rig. We'll have to search more of the sky."

тАЬOr no one is sending."

тАЬWe couldn't say that even after searching the whole sky."

тАЬMaybe it's the rig,тАЭ Juan said, suppressing his desolate mood.

тАЬI checked it from top to bottom today. Mind if I stay for part of your shift?"

Juan nodded, slipped into the control seat and strapped in, then opened the gyro controls. The screen's
dark blue eye was blank as it came on; audio was silent. The magnetic field was a still pond waiting for a
pebble to drop in. He reached out with a kind of lonely love and prayed for a faster-than-light particle to
be absorbed, resonate with atomic particles in the field, and show up as an unmistakable jiggle on the
display.

Malachi's hand touched his shoulder. тАЬDon't take it so hard, dear chap. You stare at that thing as if
expecting to see into the mind of God."

Maybe there was no one out there at all, Juan thought, and humankind was alone in the universe. His
project had only added a tachyon silence to the radio silence of the universe. He had built a tachyon
detector which did not detect tachyons, and that would be enough for Titus Summet to close it down.