"Bruce Holland Rogers - Big Far Now" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

way home. It's all very good to say we can wait two years, but while the stuff is still in the ground, I'm
going to have nightmares thinking that we'll wait until the last minute, dig into the mountain, and find out
Dr. Balas and his team were wrong."
"Balas," said someone in the crowd behind me, "how sure are you that the stuff is down there?"
I had forgotten my headache. Now it pounded back into my temples. "It's down there."
I looked at Meeker, my can-do man. Bastard. All Joanna wanted was a little delay.
"The readings are right. My team has triple-checked them." I turned around. "I recommend delay. It
can't hurt. I looked at Susan. "Dr. Suhl?"
"Damn it, I'm chairing this meeting," Meeker said.
 Suhl ignored him. "I'm willing to give it a try," she said. "One discovery of the right kind could be
tremendously profitable. Who knows?"
"Could be. Might be. Maybe. Who knows?" said Meeker. He was losing. If the vote had come right
then, Joanna would have had her delay.
"Listen," Meeker said. He lowered his voice so we had to strain to hear him. "I was a wealthy man on
Earth. I had a big job with ColAdmin." He dropped his voice even lower, as though he were choking on
emotion. "Let me tell you about my apartment. It was top floor, with a window. True, the only view I had
was of the brick wall across the alley. But a window!"
Meeker took a deep breath. Rain pattered above us. "My place was big. I could almost stand up in it,
and it had two rooms, a four mat and a six mat. I had a cooker that I owned, and once a month I had
frozen meat. As I said, I was a rich man."
I could feel the mood shifting around me.
"You look outside for a moment at what we have here," Meeker said. "Eventually we'll be growing
food here. Growing it. And you can walk across a whole world now, walk outdoors without shielding,
without breathing through a catalyzer. You think for a moment about what you used to have. I know
none of you had it as soft as I did. You think about delay, about digging into that mountain at the last
minute and finding that Balas is wrong."
"I'm not wrong!" My voice sounded too loud, too defensive.
"Let's take that vote," Meeker almost whispered.
Susan and Joanna and I voted for delay, along with a handful of others. But Meeker had known our
worst fears. He had known what buttons to push. We were going to open up Mount Meeker to see for
ourselves what was in there. The Shies would have to find a new totem. Meeker was smiling as he
unloaded the audio chip of the meeting. He gave it to Captain Rhamal, who went back and logged it
aboard the Kepler.
I went to Joanna to console her. "I'm not going to let it happen," she said.
"We voted," I said. "It's over."
"Like hell. Don't you see how important this is?"
"Joanna, maybe you can explain to the Shies, help them see that this is inevitable."
She shook her head and started out of the Glass House. I thought of following her, but I didn't.
***


I should have. Fifteen minutes later we heard a high-pitched sound coming from the forest. A particle
cutter.
Meeker looked around the room. "Carpaccio!" he said, and we all knew what he was thinking. The
next thing I knew, I was at the head of the whole colony, running toward the end of the road we had
started to build.
She had turned the cutter on our vehicles. The tread roller had a slice right down the middle of it, and
she had cut the manipulator arm from one of the utility crawlers so that it lay in the mud like an amputated
claw.
"Jo!" I said.