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

thought about was how to get away alive. My own luck was better, but I don’t want
to stretch it.”
***
“We have to land,” Bates told me. “If we don’t, your uncle would only send
us back.”
The diamonds had captured Elena.
“So many!” She stirred a handful of the great gems with a finely tapered
forefinger, her own eyes shining. “So big! So perfect. All almost identical. I’ve got
to know how they came to be.”
She wanted to see that strange white stuff for herself. The copilot was still
fighting his funk. Bates was cautious, but he set us down on the western shore of a
narrow mountain peninsula that ran south across the equator from the largest
continent. She ran tests and pronounced the nitrogen harmless, so long as we didn’t
try to breathe it.
With oxypacks and breathing masks, we cycled out of the air lock. A breeze
off the sea felt warm enough for T-shirts, but the white sand beach sloped up to
what looked like banks of snow. Dark cliffs stood beyond them, cut with a
sheer-walled canyon that came down from a mountain ridge. The cliffs were topped
with something white.
We had come prepared for work outside, with nuclear power for the oxygen
generators. To sow the algae, we had brought four light rocket-driven drones. The
pilots went to work at once, assembling them. I climbed down to a tidal pool for a
sample of the native sea water when Elena wanted to test the spores in it and
tramped with her up the beach for a closer look at the white stuff.
“Frost!” She knelt with a pocket lens to study films of it on the rocks. The
mask muffled her voice. “But growing like something alive.”
Under the sun, it did glitter like frost.
“Hexagonal crystals,” she said. “Like snowflakes, but—” She leaned closer.
“Each one has a bright point at the center. Something that glints like a tiny
diamond.”
Higher up the beach it had grown thicker, finally into something like crystal
fur, ankle deep. Fascinated with it, she was still disappointed.
“I had a glimpse of something taller, farther inland, as we came down. I’d like
to see it.”
“I don’t want you to kill yourself.”
“Not with all these riddles around us!” Dark eyes shining, she shrugged
danger away. “I could work here forever.”
***
In the months we stayed to watch the spores at work, I came to love her.
Back on Earth, I’d begun a very modest academic career, planning a historical
monograph on my uncle’s interstellar enterprises. No woman had ever held me long,
but her fascination with the exotic mysteries of the planet gave Elena herself a bit of
its hazardous allure. Perhaps I gave her an escape from too much strangeness. She
began to share her cabin with me.
The copilot was jealous; he had dated her before we left Earth. To fend him
off, she announced that we were engaged. We made a little ceremony of it. The pilot
had brought wine. I had no ring. Instead, I gave her a keepsake coin. A farewell gift
from my father before he went away, it was a worn silver dollar minted in ancient
America. He told me to carry it for luck, though it had brought no luck to him.
 Cheerfully enough, the copilot lifted his glass to us and the future of New