"Jack Williamson - Nitrogen Plus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

Long halls in the basement crypt are lined with cold lockers labeled with the fading
names of men and women who had planned to be back after decades or centuries to
open them again.
The pilot I hired was Buzz Bates, a lanky, bald, and ageless veteran of half a
hundred flights. His copilot was an anxious young apprentice who had never been
beyond the solar system. I spent an evening with them in the bar, listening to his tales
of desperate adventure on far-off worlds, and even here on Earth.
Home from his first voyage on the eve of the great New England disaster, he
barely got off again before the impact. His birth city, ancient New York, was gone
when he got back again, Atlantica standing on the site. The apprentice listened
uneasily and drank too much until Bates finally had to help him up to his room.
I rented a cold crypt box for myself and left a few documents and holos I
didn’t want to lose. We took off in a little quantum-wave cruiser with a load of
engineered algae spores and gear for their dispersal. Our staff biologist was Elena
Queler. A lively brunette with a wry wit and a voice I liked. She laughed at my regrets
at having to abandon all I had known.
“No grief for me! My own life had gone sour. Wrong guy living with me.
Research funds dried up. Thumbs turned down on my nano-nurse project. Nitrogen
or spitrogen, New Earth has got to be better than the hell I’ve had here.”
We scanned the planet from space.
“Another Eden!” Excitement lit her piquant face. “Waiting to be created.”
The seas were a pure and brilliant blue, the two great continents rimmed with
bare earth in many different shades, but never a hint of green chlorophyll. Most of
the land shone with a strange and brilliant white.
“Snow?” I wondered.
“In the tropics?” She laughed at the question and turned serious. “The
spectrometer boggles me. Odd signatures of silicon and carbon. Not a trace of free
oxygen. I want a closer look.”
As we dropped closer, Pilot Bates discovered a tiny satellite in low orbit. It
turned out to be the lost lander. The copilot got into space gear to go aboard. He
was gone a long time.
“All dead.”
Back at last, peeling off his gear, he looked sick and shaken.
“The crew. The automatics. Everything.” He shivered and stood silent till
Bates made him go on. “I got through the lock with a laser torch. No air inside. The
bodies are freeze-dried mummies, brittle as glass. I found a quarter-ton of some
queer crystal stuff they’d loaded in the cargo bay. It must have killed them.”
“How?”
“Just a hunch.” He shrugged and went silent for an instant. “If you’d seen the
bodies! Mouths gaping open. Oxygen masks still in their hands, but I think they died
fighting for breath.
“I found these.”
He tossed a plastic bag that rattled when the pilot caught it.
“Don’t ask where they got them.” He shivered. “Bait, I imagine, to tempt them
out of their wits.”
The bag held half a kilo of diamonds. Perfect white octahedral crystals
weighing up to a dozen carats, they glittered like a shattered rainbow when he let us
see them. The pilot goggled at them and battered him with questions.
“I never touched the white stuff,” he said. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t
want to. I did look for records, a logbook, anything. Not a clue. I think all they