"Piper, H Beam - Fuzzy 1 - little Fuzzy1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

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."

He knew what was worrying both of them. Emmert was afraid the
Federation Colonial Office would blame him for drawing fire on
them from the conservationists. Kellogg was afraid he'd be blamed
for not predicting the effects before his division endorsed the
project. As a division chief, he had advanced as far as he would in
the Company hierarchy; now he was on a Red Queen's racetrack,
running like hell to stay in the same place.

"The rainfall's dropped ten per cent from last year, and fifteen
percent from the year before that," Kellogg was saying. "And some
non-Company people have gotten hold of it, and so has Interworld
News. Why, even some of my people are talking about ecological
side-effects. You know what will happen when a story like that gets
back to Terra. The conservation fanatics will get hold of it, and the
Company'll be criticized."