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

Next day, a little hung over, I found my way through new streets back to the
Skipper’s Club. The old building looked shabbier and smaller than ever, dwarfed
now by a forest of towers around it. I paid the rent due and opened Elena’s cold
crypt box.
Inside, I found a little green jade Buddha, holo shots of her home and her
parents and her kid sister, a hand-written diary with entries about her school friends
and a young hyperspace engineer who had taken her out to Neptune Station on the
first trial flight of a new skipship and broken her heart when he left on an eighty-year
cruise. One of the holos, made at the dig, showed her squinting happily into the
Indian sun, holding the little jade figure up to the camera.
“A wonderful omen!” she had captioned it. “Of enlightenment to come!”
I read the words through a blur of tears, still dreaming of things I had failed to
do that might have saved her. When my mind had cleared, along with my vision, I
renewed the lease on my own box and left her diary and the Buddha in it. Next day I
told my uncle to keep the desk job. I was returning to New Earth.
His baby face flushed crimson, he raved at me for half an hour. What sort of
idiot would give up eternal life for a woman dead a hundred years ago? All I knew
was that I had to go. In the end he controlled his wrath and agreed to make me his
personal agent on the new expedition.
“The diamonds are your first priority. Locate the source. Determine its extent.
Secure it from any hazards, on or off the planet.” His charm came on. “Do that, my
boy, and you may still live forever.”
***
His organization was already busy. A passenger vessel could carry a hundred
pioneer families. A huge freighter would remain in orbit, ferrying supplies and
equipment down to support the colony. He had arranged for a military escort,
prepared for space or surface operations.
Again we studied New Earth from space. The science team found the algae at
work, free oxygen everywhere. Green life had tinted some of the tropic coasts,
though most of the land was still white with that anomalous silicon stuff.
If my uncle wanted diamonds, where were we to find them?
The dead men on the survey lander had left us no clue. We did know,
however, that their planned landing site had been on that equatorial peninsula, where
the planet’s rotation would help lift them back into orbit. Its backbone was a rugged
mountain chain, covered with what looked like a dense jungle of the silicon crystals.
East of the mountains, the ground sloped down to a delta plain that was only lightly
frosted.
The pilot set us down there, on level ground between two narrow rivers. The
science team found the air breathable, though the oxygen content was still too low to
support sustained exertion. Bulldozers came down to scrape the frost from building
sites, and equipment to build oxygen generators.
For the diamond hunt, Bates brought down a heavy, wide-tracked armored
crawler that looked able to go anywhere. The oxygen was too thin for combustion
engines, and of course the planet had not grown anything to form coal or oil to fuel
them. The crawler had nuclear power and oxygen boosters.
We struck west across the peninsula on a bright early morning, with a crew of
five. I sat beside the driver on a high seat shielded with armor glass. The steam
turbine ran silently, the caterpillar tracks crunching the silicon growth. The cool west
wind that blew had a dry dust-scent when I slipped my mask aside. The silicon stuff
grew thicker and taller as we climbed. Crystal feathers and fans and spikes had