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

"I'll remember that," she said, "while also recalling that you did your
best to give me the business."

She turned and was gone before he could reply. An hour later, having
survived a wild greeting from a lonely little dog, she was lifting the Mother
for space. Two blinks away from Haven the routes crossed. A right turn
took her back toward the galactic core and the mining belt. A left turn and
she was on the way to X&A Central and a serious conference with the
Service scientists. It was decision time. The generator didn't need
charging, but she put it on refill mode to buy time to think, went into the
exercise room, stripped to her briefs and walked as she thought. If she
went to X&A on Xanthos and showed them Old Smiley, the friendly fossil
skull, the rocks would be fenced off by an X&A electronic cordon and
there'd be no more gold for Erin Kenner. She had a million credits. With a
million credits she could find a quiet little backwater on a frontier planet
and live comfortably ever after. On Xanthos, however, where the bright
lights were, a nice apartment would cost five thousand credits a month,
sixty thousand a year. A sporty aircar went for over a hundred thousand.
A million wouldn't last her a lifetime on Xanthos, or on any other metro
planet.

It was a tough decision. She was, after all, a loyal citizen of the U.P.
She'd just been shown, on Haven, that the Service took care of its own.
X&A had paid for her education and had given her the training that had
enabled her to navigate to the gold belt and back in safety. Being ex-X&A,
she had her share of the induced xenophobia that haunted a race
face-to-face in three dimensions with the big, unexplored dark. She shared
the knowledge that entire civilizations, multi-planet cultures, had passed
into oblivion before man fought his way into space for the second time.
She knew why the United Planets maintained a huge, heavily armed fleet
of ships in service and in mothballs. Although the power that had
devastated the Dead Worlds was unknown and, therefore, doubly
awesome, mankind hoped that his weapons would be adequate to face an
emergence from deep space of things like those beings who could kill a
world from the inside out.

It was her duty to report her findings, of course. Perhaps study of the
fossil remains in the belt would give man more information on what had
happened to at least three advanced races who were no more.

Ah, but there was another possibility. The skull she'd found could have
been seeded onto the planet which had been shattered into asteroids. Old
Smiley might be the only humanoid fossil in the whole belt.

"Mr. Mop," she said, shaking hands at Mop's request,

"Wouldn't it seem to you that our friend can wait a few months longer
for his moment in the limelight?"