"Geoffrey A. Landis - The Man in the Mirror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

THE MAN IN THE MIRROR
by GEOFFREY A. LANDIS

****

Some of you may think you recognize this problem, but there’s an
important difference!

It was pure luck that Lynn Rockross was there. Pure bad luck.

Or maybe not luck at all. Out in the dark, you made your own luck. If
the luck of Lynn Rockross was bad, it was luck he’d forged for himself.

Ramblin’ Wreck had come out from the inner solar system on a long,
constant-thrust interplanetary trajectory. After eight months in space, on
their slow approach to Sedna the crew had nearly missed seeing the
anomalous landform. It was a perfect circle of pure black. Ramblin’ Wreck
’s crew wasn’t being paid to look for unusual things, and really, a
twenty-two-kilometer circle wasn’t even that unusual. Across the solar
system, circles pockmarked the surface of every body, large or small,
circles and networks of circles and chains and doodles of circles, craters of
every size.

But this one was not just a circle, it was a perfect circle. And on a
distant iceball, a world covered everywhere with a thick layer of
reddish-brown snow, it was perfectly black.

Who would have expected an alien artifact on Sedna?

Sedna was one of the largest of the objects in the trans-Neptunian
belt, a small world nearly the size of Pluto, but in a wildly eccentric orbit, so
far away from the Sun as to be forever frozen.

It was the topic of discussion on the Ramblin Wreck for about a week
as they braked into orbit, between poker games, but the crew chief,
Kellerman—a hard-nosed miner with the soul of an accountant—told them
that investigating alien enigmas was not the job that the crew of the
Ramblin’ Wreck had come all this way to do, and he was not about to take
good time away from the paying job to go look at it. They were miners, not
scientists. Sedna was a rich source of organics. Organics could be shipped
to any of the colony worlds in the inner solar system. If they could find
ammonia as well, they’d have pay dirt. Ammonia was a source of nitrogen,
valuable nitrogen, far more valuable than gold or platinum in the built worlds
where every volatile molecule had to be imported. Prospecting Sedna was
an economic gamble; it was so far from the Sun that only a huge strike
would make it worth paying the amazing shipping costs to send resources
inward. But the built worlds were an ever-expanding market, and if they
could show that Sedna had deposits rich enough to justify the travel time,
Sedna would be a little money mine for the corporation, a slow but steady
source of income.