"Wil McCarthy - The Technetium Rush" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCarty Sarah)

lay claim to four of the world’s richest diamond sites, imprisoned romantically
beneath the arctic permafrost. Over a three-year period, fueled by hope and JP4
kerosene, a swarm of helicopters and geological shock troops staked out fifty-three
million acres of mineral claims. It was a tale of rogues and spies, claim-jumpers and
border skirmishes, camouflage nets, and electronic spoofing. But Fipke was born
for this world, staying always one step ahead, and ultimately it was his science, more
than any skullduggery, that sealed the day. Diamonds are found in volcanic chimneys
called “kimberlite pipes,” and when the dust and snow had settled he was in
possession of all the important ones, leaving only dregs and downwash for his rivals.
Unpretentious as any storybook hero, Fipke was worth a billion rupees by the turn
of the millennium and yet maintained a modest lifestyle, even continuing his
fieldwork. Dirt beneath his fingernails, yes. What a bloke.

Did Rakesh Solanki—then an impressionable teen on a middle-class
Bahawalpur cotton farm—hear the tale on NDTV, or read about it somewhere? Or
did it simply echo in the public spirit until that afternoon in Bhilwara, when it
suddenly gelled?

****

Jump ahead two years, to 1996. While America’s Internet balloon began its
historic inhale, while India’s economy struggled out of a thousand-year recession,
Rakesh Solanki was a farm boy in a big-city college. In pictures of the day he peers
out from behind thick glasses, exuding the funny, cheery confidence of a man well
out of his depth and loving it. His grades were fine, his studies went well, but on the
side, he was prowling the streets of Delhi, looking for the things young men have
always sought. No doubt panning for loose women, our intrepid Rocky instead
discovered beer, then hemp, then betting parlors where dice and football could—and
often did!—finance the next round of amorous prospecting.

And still his grades were good. Never ruled by his wild side, Solanki ploughed
his way through three semesters of foundation courses and was showing particularly
well in the earth sciences, which would, he seemed to assume, become an
interesting, if modest, career. And then something happened. Like a thunderclap, the
petite poetess Abha Abhilasha Vyas crashed into his life. Although we may suspect
the irony was lost on our randy young fellow, Ms. Vyas’s name can of course be
translated as “desire for things that glitter”—an omen further punctuated by the
manner of their meeting, in Kamla Nagar’s dilapidated Kothari Gamehouse.

It’s hard to believe all the witnesses who claim to have been there at the time,
but this much seems certain: Clad in a green and gold blouse of questionable
opacity, she leaned in front of Rakesh Solanki, so that his view of the TV was
replaced with a view of her slight but shapely bosom, and said in Hindi, “Hey,
goggles, be a darling and lend me a fifty.”

“Buzz off,” he answered in English, craning for a view of the game.

To which she replied, “Come on, mate, I’ve seen you up at the college. I’m a
physicist, right? Fascinated with the laws of probability. Help a girl with her
homework.”