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

breath, matched velocity with the nearest large rock. The rock was
tumbling slowly. It had ragged, sharp edges. No rain, no friction, no
nothing in space to weather it. It was as big on one relatively flat surface
as a city block, rounded on the other three sides. She edged the ship
closer, turned on the detectors. Not much happened.

She moved on to make another nerve-racking approach to a slowly
tumbling rock mountain and used the detectors again. Nothing. It was
four hours and several fruitless tries later that she pulled up alongside a
smaller chunk of rock and turned on the detectors to hear them sing out
loudly of heavy metals. She did some fine tuning and nodded.

"Well, Mr. Mop," she said, "There's gold in them thar hills, after all."

It was challenging as hell to bring the ship closer and closer to the
slowly tumbling chunk of mass and inertia. One little misjudgment and it
was one helluva long walk home. She edged up to a flat surface, teased
Mother into followed the tumbling motion, hit the guidance jets, yelped as
the landing gear contacted the rock.

Mop said, "Yipe."

"Now you're worried?" she asked, as she adjusted the field to include
the big rock and to effectively attach it to the ship. She let the computer
measure the roll and tumble and fed impulses into the flux drive and
guidance jets until the disturbing motions were stilled and the ship and
rock, held together by the power of Mother's giant generator, sailed
serenely along without so much as a wobble.

"My boy," she said, "things are looking up."

There was a huge vein of gold directly under the ship. She took up
station in the second crew's cabin, which her father had turned into a
control room for the raining equipment. Soon an extractor arm was using
a laser to boil rock away from the vein of gold and, before the end of her
first work day, she had not just some gold, but pounds of gold aboard ship.
Gold so pure that it seemed to glow.

When the vein of almost pure gold ran out she moved ship, using the
extractor arm to pull Mother to a new position. There was gold, but it
wasn't nearly as pure as the first vein. She lifted ship and spent several
days trying to find another source as rich as that of the first day. After a
week of it, she came to the conclusion that she was not going to get rich in
a matter of days, that the first vein had been a fluke. Not that there
weren't fortunes contained in the asteroid belt. There was enough gold
and platinum metals and silver to make her one of the richest people in
the U.P., but it wasn't going to be all that easy. The Mother Lode wasn't
going to go home laden with nuggets of pure gold, but she would go back
with very, very rich ore filling all available cargo spaces. Heck, it might
even take two or three trips out there to make her as rich as she decided