James P. Hogan - Giants 02 by The Gentle Giants of Ganymede

Author:The Gentle Giants of Ganymede
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-01T13:32:18+00:00

Chapter Twelve

The Ganymean engineers announced that the ship beneath Pithead would provide the parts needed to repair the drive system of the Shapieron and that the work would take three to four weeks. A shuttle service between Pithead and Main came into being as technicians and scientists of both races cooperated in the venture. The Ganymeans, of course, directed and carried out the technical side of the operation while the Earthmen took care of the transportation, logistics, and domestic arrangements. Parties of UNSA experts were invited aboard the Shapieron to observe the work in progress and to stand in spellbound fascination as some of the mysteries and intricacies of Ganymean science were explained. One eminent authority on nuclear engineering from Jupiter Five declared later that the experience made him feel like “an unapprenticed plumber’s mate being shown around a fusion plant.”

While all this was going on, a team of UNSA specialists at Main worked out a schedule to give ZORAC a crash course on terrestrial computer science and technology. The result of this exercise was the construction of a code-conversion and interface system, most of the details of which were worked out by ZORAC itself, to couple the Ganymean computer directly into the communications network at Main and thus into the computer complex of J5. This gave ZORAC, and through it the Ganymeans as well, direct access to J5’s data banks and opened up a mine of information on many aspects of the ways of life, history, geography and sciences of Earth – for which the aliens had insatiable appetites.

One day, in the communications room of the Mission Control Center at UNSA Operational Command Headquarters, Galveston, there was consternation when a strange voice began speaking suddenly and unexpectedly over the loudspeaker system. It was another of ZORAC’s jokes. The machine had composed its own message of greeting to Earth and injected it into the outgoing signal stream of the laser link from Jupiter.

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