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Planets of Adventure [сборник]
- Автор: Лейнстер Мюррей
- Год: 2003
- Язык: английский
- Год: Baen
- ISBN: 0-7434-7162-8
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Planets of Adventure [сборник]». Краткое содержание книги:
"I haven't the least idea," said Aletha. "But I think you'll come up with something we couldn't possibly imagine. And I didn't say it was because you were vain, but because you are discontented with yourself. It's born in you. And there you are!"
"If you mean neurotic," snapped Bordman, "you're all wrong. I'm not neurotic. I'm hot, and I'm annoyed. I'll get hopelessly behind schedule because of this mess. But that's all!"
Aletha stood up and shrugged her shoulders ruefully.
"I repeat my apology," she told him, "and leave you the office. But I also repeat that I think you'll turn up something nobody else expects—and I've no idea what it will be. But you'll do it now to prove that I'm wrong about how your mind works."
She went out. Bordman clamped his jaws tightly. He felt that especially haunting discomfort which comes of suspecting that one has been told something about oneself which may be true.
"Idiotic!" he fumed, all alone. "Me neurotic? Me wanting to prove I'm the best man here out of vanity?" He made a scornful noise. He sat impatiently at the desk. "Absurd!" he muttered. "Why should I need to prove to myself I'm capable? What would I do if I felt such a need, anyhow?"
Scowling, he stared at the wall. It was a nagging sort of question. What would he do if she were right? If he did need constantly to prove to himself—
He stiffened, suddenly. A look of intense surprise came upon his face. He'd thought of what a self-doubtful, discontented man would try to do, here on Xosa II at this juncture.
The surprise was because he had also thought of how it could be done.
The Warlock came to life. Her skipper gloomily answered the emergency call from Xosa II. In a minute he clicked off the communicator and hastened to an exterior port, deeply darkened against those times when the blue-white sun Xosa shone upon this side of the hull. He moved the manual control to make it more transparent, and stared down at the monstrous, tawny, mottled surface of the planet five thousand miles away. He searched for the spot he knew was the colony's site.
He saw what he'd been told he'd see. It was an infinitely fine, threadlike projection from the surface of the planet. It rose at a slight angle—it leaned toward the planet's west—and it expanded and widened and formed an extraordinary sort of mushroom-shaped object that was completely impossible. It could not be. Humans do not create visible objects twenty miles high, which at their tops expand like toadstools on excessively slender stalks, and which drift westward, fray, and grow thin, and are constantly renewed.
But it was true. The skipper of the Warlock gazed until he was completely sure. It was no atomic bomb, because it continued to exist. It faded, but was constantly replenished. There was no such thing!
He went through the ship, bellowing, and faced mutinous snarlings. But when the Warlock was around on that side of the planet again, the members of the crew saw the strange appearance, too. They examined it with telescopes. They grew hysterical. They went frantically to work to clear away the signs of a month and a half of mutiny and despair.
It took them three days to get the ship to tidiness again, and during all that time the peculiar tawny jet remained. On the sixth day the jet was fainter. On the seventh it was larger than before. It continued larger. And telescopes at highest magnification verified what the emergency communication had said.
Then the crew began to experience frantic impatience. It was worse, waiting those last three or four days, than even all the hopeless time before. But there was no reason to hate anybody now. The skipper was very much relieved.
Eighteen hundred feet of steel grid soared overhead. It made a criss-crossed, ring-shaped wall more than a quarter mile high and almost to the top of the surrounding mountains. But the valley was not exactly a normal one. It was a crater, now: a steeply sloping, conical pit whose walls descended smoothly to the outer girders of the red painted, glistening steel structure. More girders for the completion of the grid projected from the sand just outside its circle. And in the landing-grid there was now a smaller, elaborate, truss-braced object. It rested on the rocky ground, unpainted and quite small. A hundred feet high, perhaps, and no more than three hundred across. But it was visibly a miniature of the great, newly-uncovered, repainted landing-grid which was qualified to handle inter-stellar cargo ships and all the proper space-traffic of a minerals colony planet.
A caterwheel truck came lurching and rolling and rumbling down the side of the pit. It had a sunshade and ground reflector wings, and Bordman slouched on a hobby-horse saddle in its back cargo section. He wore a heat-suit.
The truck reached the pit's bottom and bumped up to a tool-shed and stopped. Bordman got out, visibly cramped by the jolting, rocking, exhausting ride.
"Do you want to go in the shed and cool off?" asked Chuka.
"I'm all right," said Bordman. "I'm quite comfortable, so long as you feed me that expanded air." It was plain that he resented needing even a special air-supply. "What's all this about? Bringing the Warlock in? Why the insistence on my being here?"
"Ralph has a problem," said Chuka blandly. "He's up there—See? He needs you. There's a hoist. You've got to check degree-of-completion anyhow. You might take a look around while you're up there. But he's anxious for you to see something. There where you see the little knot of people. The platform."
Bordman grimaced. When one was well started on a survey, one got used to heights and depths and all sorts of environments. But he hadn't been up on steel work in a good many months. Not since a survey on Kalka IV nearly a year ago. He would be dizzy at first.
He accompanied Chuka to the spot where a steel cable dangled from an almost invisibly thin beam high above. There was a strictly improvised cage to ascend in—planks and a hand rail forming an insecure platform that might hold four people. He got into it, and Dr. Chuka got in beside him. Chuka waved his hand. The cage started up.
Bordman winced as the ground dropped away below. It was ghastly to be dangling in emptiness like this. He wanted to close his eyes. The cage went up and up. It took many long minutes to reach the top.
There was a newly-made platform there. The sunlight was blindingly bright, the landscape an intolerable glare. Bordman adjusted his goggles to maximum darkness and stepped gingerly from the swaying cage to the hardly more solid-seeming area. Here he was in midair on a platform barely ten feet square. It was rather more than twice the height of a metropolitan skyscraper from the ground. The mountain-crests were only half a mile away and not much higher. Bordman was acutely uncomfortable. He would get used to it, but—
"Well?" he asked. "Chuka said you needed me here. What's the matter?"
Ralph Redfeather nodded formally. Aletha was here, too, and two of Chuka's foremen—one did not look happy—and four of the Amerind steel-workers. They grinned at Bordman.
"I wanted you to see," said Aletha's cousin, "before we threw on the current. It doesn't look like that little grid could handle the sand it took care of. But Lewanika wants to report."
A dark man who worked under Chuka—and looked as if he belonged on solid ground—said:
"We cast the beams for the small landing-grid, Mr. Bordman. We melted the metal out of the cliffs and ran it into moulds as it flowed down."
He stopped. One of the Indians said:
"We made the girders into the small landing-grid. It bothered us because we built it on the sand that had buried the big grid. We didn't understand why you ordered it there. But we built it."
The second dark man said with a trace of swagger: