"Arthur C. Clarke. The fountains of paradise" - читать интересную книгу автора

twenty-four hours. When the reverberations had died away, the Mahanayake
turned to his companion.
"So much for dedicated re-entry corridors," he said, with slightly more
annoyance than an exponent of the Dharma should permit himself. "Did we get
a meter reading?"
The younger monk spoke briefly into his wrist microphone, and waited
for a reply.
"Yes-it peaked at a hundred and twenty. That's five db above the
previous record."
"Send the usual protest to Kennedy or Gagarin Control, whichever it is.
On second thoughts, complain to them both. Not that it will make any
difference, of course."
As his eye traced the slowly dissolving vapour trail across the sky,
Bodhidharma Mahanayake Thero - eighty-fifth of his name - had a sudden and
most un-monkish fantasy. Kalidasa would have had a suitable treatment for
space-line operators who thought only of dollars per kilo to orbit...
something that probably involved impalement, or metal-shod elephants, or
boiling oil.
But life, of course, had been so much simpler, two thousand years ago.

2. The Engineer

His friends, whose numbers dwindled sadly every year, called him Johan.
The world, when it remembered him, called him Raja. His full name epitomised
five hundred years of history; Johan Oliver de Alwis Sri Rajasinghe.
There had been a time when the tourists visiting the Rock bad sought
him out with cameras and recorders, but now a whole generation knew nothing
of the days when he was the most familiar face in the solar system. He did
not regret his past glory, for it had brought him the gratitude of all
mankind. But it had also brought vain regrets for the mistakes he had made -
and sorrow for the lives he had squandered, when a little more foresight or
patience might have saved them. Of course, it was easy now, in the
perspective of history, to see what should have been done to avert the
Auckland Crisis, or to assemble the unwilling signatories of the Treaty of
Samarkand. To blame himself for the unavoidable errors of the past was
folly, yet there were times when his conscience hurt him more than the
fading twinges of that old Patagonian bullet.
No-one had believed that his retirement would last so long. "You'll be
back within six months," World President Chu had told him. "Power is
addictive."
"Not to me," he had answered, truthfully enough.
For power had come to him; he had never sought it. And it had always
been a very special, limited kind of power - advisory, not executive. He was
only Special Assistant (Acting Ambassador) for Political Affairs, directly
responsible to President and Council, with a staff that never exceeded
ten-eleven, if one included ARISTOTLE. (His console still had direct access
to Ari's memory and processing banks, and they talked to each other several
times a year.) But towards the end the Council had invariably accepted his
advice, and the world had given him much of the credit that should have gone
to the unsung, unhonoured bureaucrats of the Peace Division.