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Even from fifteen years ago... it was she--for she had come with the Mayflower
H. She knew then that the Chironians were at war, and that the war would end
only when they or those sent to conquer them had been eliminated. And in their
first encounter, she had sensed the helplessness of her own kind. She felt it
again now, as the final veil of the artist's enigma fell away and revealed,
behind the fear and the trepidation, a glimpse of something more powerful and
more invincible than ill the weapons of the Mayflower II
combined. She was staring at her own extinction.
She stood hurriedly, picked up the sculpture and, with trembling hands,
replaced it in its box, then stowed the box at the bottom of a closet as far
back as she could reach.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
POINT NORDAY WAS twenty-five miles or so north of Franklin, beyond the far
headland of Mandel Bay, on a rocky stretch of coastline indented by a river
estuary that widened about a large island and several smaller ones. In the
early days of the colony, when the Founders first began to venture out of the
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original base to explore their surroundings on foot, they had found it to be
approximately a day's travel north of Franklin. Hence its name.
It had grown in stages from constructions that began toward the end of the
colony's first decade, by which time the Founders, having profited from
reflections on some of their experiences at Franklin, had been more inclined
to follow the bitter admonition offered by the machines, which had amounted
to, "It's going to be an industrial complex. If you mess around with it, it
won't work." The result was a clean, efficient, functional layout more in
keeping with what the Kuan-
yin's mission planners had envisaged, suitably modified where appropriate to
take account of local conditions. Besides its industrial facilities, the
complex included a seaport; an air and space terminal distributed mainly
across the islands, which were interconnected by a network of tunnels;
a college of advanced technology; and a small residential sector intended more
to afford short- to medium-term accommodation for people whose business made
it convenient for them to be in the vicinity than to house permanent
inhabitants, although about half the population had been there for years. The
Chironians, it turned out, tended to live lives that were more
project-oriented
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teryear.txt than career-oriented, and they moved around a lot if it suited
them.
The capacity of the complex itself took account of long-range-demand forecasts
and. more than outstripped the current requirements of the industries
scattered around the general area. Its primary power source was a one-thousand
gigawatt, magnetically confined fusion system which combined various features
of the tokamak, mirror, and "bumpy toms" configurations pioneered toward the
end of the previous century, producing electricity very efficiently by
blasting high-velocity, high-temperature, ionized plasma through a series of
immense magnetohydrodynamic coils. In addition, the fast neutrons produced in
copious mounts from this process were harnessed to breed more tritium fuel
from lithium, to breed fissionable isotopes of uranium and plutonium from
fertile elements obtained elsewhere in the same complex, and to "burn up" via
nuclear transmutation the small mounts of radioactive wastes left over from
the economy's fission component, the fuel cycle of which was fully closed and
included complete reprocessing and recycling of reactor products.
The plasma emerged from this primary process with sufficient residual energy
to provide high-
quality heat for supplying a hydrogen-extraction plant, where seawater was
"cracked" thermally to yield bases for a whole range of liquid synthetic
fuels, a primary-metals extraction and processing sub complex, a
chemical-manufacturing sub complex, and a desalination plant which was still
not operational, but anticipated large-scale irrigation projects farther
inland in years to come.
The metals-extraction sub complex made use of the high fusion temperatures
available on-site to reduce seawater, common rocks, and sands, and all forms
of industrial and domestic waste and debris to a plasma of highly charged
elementary ions which were then separated cleanly and simply by magnetic [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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