"Niven, Larry - Del Rey Crater" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

"Sorry."
"Yah. Well, this version works all the time, Yonnie said. It's still too expensive to market."
"Hecate, is it just conceivable," I wondered, "that Shreve would like me to test their Mark Twenty-nine active shield for them?"
She shook her head; the pepper and salt crest swirled inside the helmet. Amused. "Not you . A dead flatlander celebrity riding their Mark Twenty-nine Shreveshield? They could watch your death grin in every boob cube in the solar system! Shall I take the first ride?"
"I want a fresh look. I don't want to deal with your tire prints." I boarded the Mark Twenty-nine before she could object.
She made no move to stop me. I said, "Check the reception."
She was into the lemmy's cabin in a lovely graceful leap. She brought up the feed from my helmet camera. "You're on, nice and ... actually the picture's jumping a little. Good enough, though."
"Keep your eye on me. You can coach." I kicked the Mark Twenty-nine into gear and rolled toward the rim.
I'd been wakened from a sound sleep by her call. They keep the same time over the whole moon, so it was the middle of the night for Hecate Bauer-Stanson, too.
Ah, well. I had time to shower and get some breakfast while she landed and refueled, and that's never guaranteed. But it didn't sound like the intruder in Del Rey Crater needed immediate justice.
During the flight I'd had a chance to read about Del Rey Crater.
Just before the turn of the millennium, Boeing, then more or less an aircraft company, had done a survey. What kind of customer would pay how much for easy access to orbit?
The answers it got depended heavily on the cost of launch. A hundred thirty years ago those costs were the stuff of fantasy. NASA's weird political spacecraft, the Shuttle, launched for three thousand dollars per pound and up. At that price there would be no customers at all: nothing would fly without tax-financed kickbacks, and nothing did.
At two hundred dollars a pound--then considered marginally possible--the Net could afford to hold gladiatorial contests in orbit.
Intermediate prices would buy High Frontier antiweapons, orbiting solar power, high-end tourism, hazardous waste disposal, funerals ...
Funerals. For five hundred dollars a pound, an urnful of ashes could be launched frozen in a block of ice for the solar wind to scatter to the stars. They launched from Florida in those days. Florida's funeral lobby must have owned the state. Florida passed a state law. No funeral procedure could be licensed in Florida unless grieving relatives could visit the grave ... via a paved road!
Boeing also considered disposal of hazardous waste from fission plants.
You wouldn't just fire it off. First you'd separate the leftover uranium and/or plutonium, the fuel, to use again. Then you'd take out low-level radioactives and bury them in bricks. The truly noxious remainder, about three percent by mass, you would package to survive an unexpected reentry. Then you'd bomb a crater on the moon with them.
Power plant technology would improve over the decades to come. Our ancestors saw that far. In time that awful goo would once again be fuel. Future stockholders would want to find it.
Boeing had chosen Del Rey Crater with some care.
Del Rey was little but deep, just at the moon's visible rim. Meteors massing 1.1 tonnes, slamming down at two kilometers per second, would raise dust plumes against the limb of the moon. An amateur's telescope could find them. Lowell Observatory could get great pictures for the evening news: effective advertising, and free. The high rim would catch more of the dust ... not all but most.
My search program had turned up a Lester del Rey with a half-century career in science fiction. The little crater had indeed been named for him. And he'd written an early story about an imaginary fission power plant: "Nerves."
To a man used to moonscapes the view from the crater rim was quite strange. It's not unusual for craters to overlap craters. But they clustered in the center, so that the central peak had been battered flat, and every crater was the same size. Yet more twenty-meter craters shaped the line that made Del Rey into one huge FORBIDDEN sign.
Everything around me was covered in pairs of tractor treadmarks a meter apart, often with a middle track as of something being dragged. A kilometer away, the tread marks thinned out and disappeared. There I began to see silvery beads at the center of every crater.
And one a little shinier, the wrong color, off center. I used the zoom feature in my faceplate to expand the view.
A pressure suit lay facedown. It was a hardshell, not a skintight. I was looking at the top of its head.
Corrugated footprints ran away from the body, three and four yards apart. The intruder had been running toward the rim to my right, south-southeast, leaping like a Lunar Olympics runner.
"Still got me, Hecate?"
"Yes, Gil. Your camera's better than the one on the waldo tug, but I can't make out any markings on the suit."
"It's head-on to me. Okay, I'm setting a relay antenna. Now I'll get closer." I started the Mark Twenty-nine rolling into the crater. If the shield around me was glowing, I couldn't see it from inside.
"I think you were wrong. That isn't a flatlander's suit. It's just old."
"Gil, we went to some effort to get the ARM involved. That was never a lunie design. It's too square. The helmet's wrong. This fishbowl design we're wearing, we were already using it when we built Luna City!"
"Hecate, how did you find this thing? How long has it been lying here?"
Hesitation. "We don't send sputniki over Del Rey Crater very often. It's hard on the instruments. Nobody saw anything odd until the waldo tugs went in, and then we got a nice view through a tug's camera."
Even if a few sputniki did cross over Del Rey, the suit wouldn't contrast with the other silver dots around it. How long had it been here? "Hecate, divert a sputnik or a ship with a camera. We need an overhead view. Do you have the authority, or do I have to play dominance games?"
"I'll find out."
"In a minute. These waldo tugs. What are you stockpiling? The moon has helium-three fusion and solar power, too!"
"Those old impact tanks go off to the Helios plants."
"Why?"
Hecate sighed. "Beats the hell out of me. Maybe you can find out. You've got clout."
I saw a canister broken open and steered wide around it. Invisible death. I couldn't see any kind of glow around me: no evil blue Cherenkov radiation and nothing from my own shield, either.
What if my wheels broke down? I might trust the Shreveshield, but how careful had Shreve Development been with something as simple, as off-the-shelf as a pair of power wheels? I couldn't leave the Mark Twenty-nine without frying ...
Dumb. I'd just carry it out. Hecate and I had picked it up easily. Why does radiation make people so nervous?
I stopped a little way from the downed suit. There were no tracks nearby, only the marks under the gloves and boots. The deader had clawed at the dust, leaving finger and toe marks. I ran the Mark Twenty-nine in a half circle, helmet camera running. Then I pulled as close as I could get and lowered the stand.
At this moment I still couldn't testify that that wasn't an empty suit. The only markings were the usual color-coded arrows, instructions for novices. They seemed faded.
I didn't much want to step down. Radioactive dust on my boots would be carried inside the Shreveshield. What I could do was lean far over, gripping the belly casing of the Mark Twenty-nine with legs and hands, and reach into the suit with my imaginary arm.
It's like reaching into water rich with weeds and scum. My fingers trail through varying texture. Yup, there's someone in there. It seems dehydrated. Corruption isn't obtrusive, and for this I'm grateful. Maybe the suit leaked. The chest ... a woman?
I reach around to touch the face lightly. Dry and ancient. I grimace and reach, trailing phantom fingers through chest and torso and abdomen.
"Gil, are you all right?"
"Sure, Hecate. I'm using my talent to see what I can feel out."