"David Brin - Tank Farm Dynamo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

The intertank hoop connects the big and little parts of the great External Tanks, or ETs,
as we call them. The smaller cell had once contained 550 cubic meters of liquid oxygen. These
days I stored gardening tools in it. Not a day had passed, in the last five years, in which I
hadn't wished someone on Earth would recognize the waste, and come and take my tool shed
away from me -- to be used in some grand and wonderful plan.
 Now they were trying to do just that, but not in a way I cared for at all.
"Boss? You still there? There's a telex from J.S.C. coming in."
I grabbed the big steel beam that had once borne the thrust of giant, strap-on solid
rocket boosters. Now it served as a convenient place to put the intercom.
"Ishido, this is Rutter. I'm on my way. Don't let them sell us for scrap till I get there. Out."
I put on my hardsuit, carefully double-checking each seal and valve. The lock cycled, and
I emerged into vacuum, but not blackness.
Overhead the Earth spanned the sky, a broad velvet blanket of browns and blues and
fleecy white clouds. From just five hundred kilometers up, you don't see the Earth as a
spinning marble in space. She covers an entire hemisphere, filling almost half the universe.
I drifted, but after a minute my boots touched the metal of the tank again. The same faint
microgravity that held my pools inside the garden worked here on the outside.
The tank was the next to last in a row of forty of the great cylinders, nestled side by side.
A parallel deck of sixteen huge tanks lay about sixty kilometers "overhead" linked to this
collection by six strong cables. Twenty meters away from where I stood, one of the half-inch
polymer tethers rose from its anchor point, a mirror-bright streak toward the planet overhead.
Sometimes a careful observer could make out B Deck without aid -- a tiny rectangle about
an eighth the apparent diameter of the moon -- against the bright bulk of the Earth. When we
crossed the terminator, the tanks in Group B sparkled like gems in Terra's sunset tiara.
Today I hadn't time to look for B Deck. The Feds had finally fired Edgar Bylinsky, the Tank
Farm's last big supporter in NASA. If we thought times were hard before, they were going to
get worse now.
"Ralph?" It was Ishido's voice again, now coming over my suit radio. "We've got the telex.
I think this is the big one."
I pushed off toward the control center. "Okay, what's the news?"
"Uh, they're moving fast. Pacifica's coming in with a couple of official bad news boys."
I could guess what they were coming to tell us. They'd say they were here for
"consultations," but actually it would be to say that Uncle Sam wasn't going to sell us any
more water.
"Don, when are the bad news boys due?"
"E.T.A. about an hour."
"I'll be right in."
Another hop took me to the entrance of the control tank. It was sheathed in layers of
plating cut from dismantled ETs, to protect the crew during solar proton storms.
While waiting for the airlock to cycle, I looked up at the Indian Ocean, where they used to
dump our tanks back at the beginning of the shuttle program. That awful waste had been one
of the reasons for founding the Tank Farm.
For years ours had been a lonely and expensive gamble. Now we had proved our point.
Proved it too well, it seemed.
They let us get a monopoly, and now they want to break us, I thought. And they might
succeed, if they cut off our water.
We had safeguarded the Key to Space for them, and expected them to be grateful when
they realized its worth. We should have known better.