"Larry Niven & Steve Barnes - The Descent of Anansi" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

Silva’s. He sized Yamada up in two intense seconds, then stretched out his hand. “Djalma
Costa,” he said. “Djalma with a D.”
“Takayuki Yamada.” Yamada turned to the third man, noting the limp, and the silver wolf’s
head cane that corrected it. “And of course you are Mr. Giorgi. Lucio Giorgi.”
Giorgi was as tall as da Silva, but much thinner. His eyes were hollow, and the skin on his
face was stretched taut over the bones, as if a long illness had stripped away the fat. Giorgi
nodded with satisfaction and spoke with excellent, though accented, English. “I see that news of
my accident precedes me.”
“We were interested in your work on the Parana Dam project. Of course, when the scaf-
folding collapsed, we knew that the famous Giorgi had been the only survivor.”
“I am perhaps too old to continue on-site inspections.”
“If this project is as successful as we hope, we will definitely desire your expertise.” They
shook hands, and all five men were seated.
There was a moment of uncomfortable tension. Then Xavier cleared his throat and slapped
his palms on the table. “Well, Mr. Yamada. If you would be so kind as to share your information
with us.”
“Certainly.” All hesitation had left him now. He swung his briefcase up to the table and
dialed its five-digit combination. There was a sharp click, and Yamada eased it open and re-
moved a thin folder of papers. He locked the case and set it on the floor.
Yamada thumbed through the folder, talking to himself in barely audible Japanese. “Ah, yes.
I trust that I do not have to fill you three gentlemen,” nodding in the direction of the newcomers,
“in on much, of the background material?”
“Skim through to today’s business,” Xavier suggested.
“Agreed. The item of interest is a cable recently extruded by Falling Angel Enterprises. Put
as simply as possible, the cable is a strand of single-crystal iron filaments locked in an epoxy
matrix.” He looked up at them with a distracted look on his face. “It is eight-tenths of a
millimeter thick and fourteen hundred kilometers long. All preliminary tests indicate that it is
much stronger than Kevlar, at least ten or twenty times stronger.”
 His eyes slid over a page and a half of notes. “Suffice it to say that the. . . ah. . . delicate
situation existing between America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration and
Falling Angel Enterprises has severely limited buyers for the cable.”
Da Silva nodded enthusiastically. “This is true. Pressure from the U. S. of A. has caused four
nations to drop out of the bidding, Great Britain just this morning.”
“Saving face,” Costa laughed. “They knew they would be outbid. Quitting now earns them a
few points in the eyes of the Americans.” There was a twist on the word “American,” as if he
was sharing a private joke. “No. We and the Japanese are the only ones remaining in the
bidding.”
“I think that I can guarantee, that Oyama Construction will win the bid. The Bridge project is
entirely too important.”
Xavier caught his breath. “How high is Oyama going?”
“One hundred and eighty million dollars.”
There was a hiss of exhaled breath, and * Costa cursed vividly. “He’s insane. . .”
“No,” Xavier said, his voice a solid weight in the room. “It is one of a kind. A thousand miles
of the strongest cable even produced by man. An option on the next five thousand to be
produced. Oyama is taking the kind of gamble that Castellon would have taken twenty years ago,
before he lost his ovos. Unlike any material ever produced on earth, now in orbit around the
Moon, waiting for someone with the will to defy the stockholders and the U. S. of A.”
“There is no hope that your Mr. Castellon will commit more funds to the project?”
“None. One hundred million is as high as he is prepared to go.”
“Then Oyama will win the bid.”