"Niven, Larry - Madness Has It's Place" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

She looked at me. "You feel nice and cool? That's a million tons of soil, old man, and a layer cake of mirror sheeting on top of that, and these old heat exchangers are still the most powerful ever built. Daylight doesn't scare you? You'll get over that."
324 MADNESS HAS ITS PLACE
Kathry was a sixth-generation Belter from Mercury, taller than m(~ by seven inches, not very strong, but extremely dexterous. She way my boss. I'd be sharing a room with her . . . and yes, she rapidly let me know that she expected us to be bedmates. '
I was all for that. Two months in Ceres had shown me that Belters respond to social signals I don't know. I had no idea how to seduce anyone.
Sylvia and Myron had been born on Mars in an enclave of arcologists digging out the cities beneath the deserts. Companions from birth, they'd married at puberty. They were addicted to news broadcasts. News could get them arguing. Otherwise they behaved as ii they could read each other's minds; they hardly talked to each other or to anyone else.
We'd sit around the duty room and wait and polish our skills as storytellers. Then one of the lasers would go quiet, and a tractor the size of some old Chicago skyscraper would roll.
Rarely was there much of a hurry. One laser would fill in for another until the Monster Bug arrived. Then the robots, riding the Monster Bug like one of Anton's aircraft carriers, would scatter ahead of us and set to work.

Two years after my arrival my first quake shook down six lasers in four different locations and ripped a few more loose from the sunlight collectors. Landscape had been shaken into new shapes. The robots had some trouble. Sometimes Kathry could reprogram them. Otherwise her team had to muscle them through, with Kathry to shout orders and me to supply most of the muscle.
Of the six lasers, five survived. They seemed built to survive almost anything. The robots were equipped to spin new support structure and to lift the things into place, with a separate program for each design.
Maybe John junior hadn't used influence in my behalf. Flatlander muscles were useful when the robots couldn't get over the dust pools or through the broken rock. For that matter, maybe it wasn't some Belt tradition that had made Kathry claim me on sight. Sylvia and Myron were lockstepped, and I might have been female or bend. Maybe she thought she was lucky.
LARRY NIVEN 325
After we'd remounted the lasers that had survived, Kathry said, "They're all obsolete, anyway. They're not being replaced."
:'That's not good," I said.
"Well, good and bad. Lightsail cargo is slow. If the light wasn't almost free, why bother? The interstellar probes haven't sent much back yet, and we might as well wait. At least the Belt Speakers think so."
"Do I gather I've fallen into a kind of a blind alley?"
She glared at me. "You're an immigrant flatlander. Were you expecting to be First Speaker for the Belt? You thinking of moving on?"
"Not really. But if the job's about to fold-"
"Another twenty years, maybe. Jack, I'd miss you. Those two-"
"It's all right, Kathry. I'm not going." I waved both arms at the blazing dead landscape, said "I like it here," and smiled into her bellow of laughter.
I beamed a tape to Anton when I got the chance.
"If I was ever angry, I got over it, as I hope you've forgotten anything I said or did while I was, let's say, running on automatic. I've found another life in deep space, not much different from what I was doing on Earth . . . though that may not last. These lightsail pusher lasers are a blast from the past. Time gets them, the quakes get them, and they're not being replaced. Kathry says twenty years.
"You said Phoebe left Earth, too. Working with an asteroid mining setup? I f you're still trading tapes, tell her I'm all right and I hope she is, too. Her career choice was better than mine, I expect. . ."
I couldn't think of anything else to do.

Three years after I expected it Kathry asked, "Why did you come out here? It's none of my business, of course-"
Customs differ: I'd been three years in her bed before she had worked up to this. I said, "Time for a change" and "I've got children and grandchildren on the moon and Ceres and Floating Jupiter."
"Do you miss them?"
I had to say yes. The result was that I took half a year off to bounce around the solar system.
After I visited my lids acid grandkids, I stayed three weeks with
326 MADNESS HAS ITS PLACE
Phoebe. She's second in command of a mining setup on a two-kilometer asteroid orbiting beyond Jupiter. They've been refining the metal ores and shaping them into scores of kilometers of electromagnetic mass driver, then running the slag down the mass driver: a rocket with real rocks in it and an arbitrarily high exhaust velocity, limited only by the length of the mass driver, which they keep extending. The asteroid will reach Ceres as mostly refined metal.
I think Phoebe was bored; she was seriously glad to see me. Still, I came back early. My being away from Mercury made us both antsy.
Another year passed, and once again Kathry wanted to know, "Why Mercury?"
I said, "What I did on Earth was a lot like this. The difference is, on Earth I'm dull. Here-am I dull?"
"You're fascinating. You won't talk about the ARM, so you're fascinating and mysterious. I can't believe you'd be dull just because of where you are. Why did you leave, really?"
So I said, "There was a woman."
"What was she like?"
"She was smarter than me. I was a little dull for her. So she left, and that would have been okay. But she came back to my best friend." I shifted uncomfortably and said, "Not that they drove me off Earth."
No?
"No. I've got everything I once had herding construction robots on Earth, plus one thing I wasn't bright enough to miss. I lost my sense of purpose when I left the ARM."
I noticed that Myron was listening. Sylvia was watching the holo walls, the three that showed the face of Mercury: rocks blazing like coals in the fading twilight, with only the robots and the lasers to give the illusion of life. The fourth wall generally carried newscasts. Just then it showed a view up the trunk into the waving branches of the tremendous redwoods they've been growing for three hundred years in Hovestraydt City on the moon.
"These are the good times," I said. "You have to notice or they'll go right past. We're holding the stars together and having a fine time doing it. Notice how much dancing we do? On Earth I'd be too old and creaky for that-" Sylvia was shaking my shoulder. "Sylvia. what.:
LARRY NIVEN 327
I heard it as soon as I stopped talking: "Tombaugh Station relayed this picture, the last broadcast from the Fantasy Prince. Once again, the Fantasy Prince has apparently been - "
Starscape glowed within the fourth holo wall. Something came out of nowhere, moving hellishly fast, and stopped so quickly that it might have been a toy. It was egg-shaped, studded with what my memory said were weapons.

Phoebe won't have made her move yet. The warcats will have to be deep in the solar system before her asteroid mine can be a deterrent. Then one or another warcat ship will find streams of slag sprayed across its path, impacting at comet speeds and higher.
By now Anton must know whether the ARM actually has plans of its own to repel an interstellar invasion.
Me, I've already done my part. I worked on the computer shortly after I first arrived. Nobody's tampered with it since. The dime disk is in place.