"Zach Hughes - Mother Lode" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

She began to punch codes into the computer. Her own birthday. The
day of her mother's death. The date of her graduation. The date of her
father's retirement. When she ran out of numbers, she began on names.
Erin. Elizabeth. John. Kenner. Mop. Nire, which was Erin backward.
Htebazile, hers and her mother's middle name spelled backward. The
computer clicked and hummed, hissed in electronic satisfaction, displayed
a typed letter.
 The letter began, "Dear Erin."

"Oh, Moppy," she moaned, as she read. "He went senile."

It was a long letter. It told of a visit from an old shipmate who had
come to New Earth specifically to see John Kenner. And then she knew
why her father had mortgaged his retirement retreat to put everything he
had and could raise into an antiquated space tug. The old shipmate had
been a member of a prospecting party that stumbled onto a belt of space
debris orbiting around a dim and distant sun, debris so rich in heavy
metals, including gold and the platinum family, metals so vital to the new
age of exploration that one trip to the belt would make a man rich.

"Oh, Dad," she whispered.

The old shipmate had died, leaving the space coordinates that would
lead his friend, John Kenner, to the rich belt of ores. There it was, a star
chart. She had to check references to orient the relatively small area
shown on the chart with the United Planets zone. The distances involved
could best be measured in thousands of parsecs. If, indeed, John Kenner's
old shipmate had gone there, deep, deep into the hazardous, star-crowded
heart of the galaxy past the mysterious Dead Worlds, he had traveled far.
Past the Dead Worlds the blink routes extended only a few light-years.

"Mop, he was going to go off the established routes," she said. "What do
you think of that?"

Mop thought it was time for a little loving. He licked his chops, leapt
into her lap, and threw himself onto his back so that she could rub his
chest.

"What are we going to do?" she asked. "What do you think?"

"Wurf," Mop said contentedly.

"You're a helluva lot of help," she said. "Here we are, owners of a Mule
equipped for deep space mining, in possession of a treasure map and
enough food to last us for three or four years and that's it, buddy. The old
home place is mortgaged to the hilt. If we could sell this mother—" She
was using that element of the tug's name in another context, and that set
the ship's personality in her mind, "—for enough to pay off the mortgage,
we'd be damned lucky."
 She had saved most of her salary during the years of deep space