"H. Beam Piper - Fuzzy Papers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

either-blasting explosives and propellants, contragravity-field gen erator parts, power tools,
pharmaceuticals, synthetic textiles. The Company didn't need to carry Zarathustra any more; Zarathustra
could carry the Company, and itself.
 Fifteen years ago, when the Zarathustra Company had sent him here, there had been a cluster of log
and prefab huts beside an improvised landing field, almost exactly where this skyscraper now stood.
Today, Mallorysport was a city of seventy thousand; in all, the planet had a population of nearly a million,
and it was still growing. There were steel mills and chemical plants and reaction plants and machine
works. They produced all their own fissionables, and had recently begun to export a little refined
plutonium; they had even started producing collapsium shielding.

The recorded voice stopped. He ran back the spool, set for sixty-speed, and transmitted it to the
radio office. In twenty minutes, a copy would be aboard the ship that would hyper out for Terra that
night. While he was finishing, his communication screen buzzed.

"Dr. Kellogg's screening you, Mr. Grego," the girl in the outside office told him.

He nodded. Her hands moved, and she vanished in a polychromatic explosion; when it cleared, the
chief of the Division of Scientific Study and Research was looking out of the screen instead. Looking
slightly upward at the showback over his own screen, Victor was getting his warm, sympathetic, sincere
and slightly too toothy smile on straight.

"Hello, Leonard. Everything going all right?"

It either was and Leonard Kellogg wanted more credit than he deserved or it wasn't and he was
trying to get somebody else blamed for it before anybody could blame him.

"Good afternoon, Victor." Just the right shade of deference about using the first name-big wheel to
bigger wheel. "Has Nick Emmert been talking to you about the Big Blackwater project today?"

Nick was the Federation's resident-general; on Zarathustra he was, to all intents and purposes, the
Terran Federation Government. He was also a large stockholder in the chartered Zarathustra Company.

"No. Is he likely to?"

"Well, I wondered, Victor. He was on my screen just now. He says there's some adverse talk
about the effect on the rainfall in the Pied mont area of Beta Continent. He was worried about it."

"Well, it would affect the rainfall. After all, we drained half a million square miles of swamp, and the
prevailing winds are from the west. There'd be less atmospheric moisture to the east of it. Who's talking
adversely about it, and what worries Nick?'

"Well, Nick's afraid of the effect on public opinion on Terra. You know how strong conservation
sentiment is; everybody's very much opposed to any sort of destructive exploitation."

"Good Lord! The man doesn't call the creation of five hundred thousand square miles of new
farmland destructive exploitation, does he?"

"Well, no, Nick doesn't call it that; of course not. But he's concerned about some garbled story
getting to Terra about our upsetting the ecological balance and causing droughts. Fact is, I'm rather
concerned myself."