Читать онлайн «Cauldron»

Автор Джек Макдевит

Cauldron
by Jack McDevitt

Acknowledgments

I’m indebted for advice and technical assistance to David DeGraff of Alfred University; Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History; and Michael Fossel, author of Cells, Aging, and Human Disease. Walter Cuirle and Travis Taylor helped out at the galactic core. Thanks also to Ralph Vicinanza, for his continuing support. To Maureen McDevitt, for her comments on an early version of the manuscript. And to my editor, Ginjer Buchanan. Star chart by Curtis Square-Briggs.

Dedication

For Jamie Bishop

PROLOGUE
Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
December 16, 2185.

The call came, as such things always seemed to, in the middle of the night. “Jason?” Lucy’s voice on the other end. Tense. Excited. But she was trying to sound professional. Unemotional.

Jason Hutchins’s first thought was that Lucy’s mother had suffered another breakdown. The woman was apparently given to nervous collapses, and the family always called Lucy. Teresa, also awakened by the call, raised an arm in protest, then pulled a pillow over her head. “Yes, Lucy? What’s the problem?”

“We have a hit!”

That brought him fully alert.

It had happened before. Periodically they got a signal that had set off alarms.

Usually it vanished within minutes and was never heard again. Occasionally, it was a human transmission bouncing around. Never during the two and a half centuries of the search had they gotten a legitimate strike. A demonstrably artificial transmission that could be confirmed. Not once. And he knew as he rolled out of bed, as he grumbled to Teresa that no there wasn’t a problem, that he’d be back in an hour or so, he knew that this would be no different.

It was at times like this, when he conceded that SETI was essentially a religious exercise, that it took a leap of faith to sit down each day in front of the screens and pretend something might actually happen, that he wondered why he hadn’t looked for a career that would provide at least the opportunity for an occasional breakthrough. Whole generations of true believers had manned the radio telescopes, some in orbit, some on the back side of the moon, a few on mountaintops, waiting for the transmission that never came. They joked about it. Waiting for Godot. I know when it happens, I’ll be at lunch.

“I do it for the money,” he told people when they asked.

A lot had changed since the early days of the project. The technology, of course, had improved exponentially. There were starships now. It was possible to go out and actually look at the worlds orbiting Alpha Centauri and 36 Ophiuchi and other reasonably nearby stars. We knew now that life existed elsewhere, even that intelligent life had flourished in a few places. But only one extant technological world was known, and that was a savage place, its nation-states constantly at war, too busy exhausting their natural resources and killing on a massive scale to advance beyond an early-twentieth-century level.