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Варли, Джон - Варли - Холодный пляж (engl)

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дФНМ бЮПКХ. уНКНДМШИ ОКЪФ (engl)

John Varley. Steel beach
---------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright (C) 1991 by John Varley.

For the personal use of those who have

purchased the ESF 1993 Award anthology only.

---------------------------------------------------------------



     STEEL BEACH


     by John Varley
CHAPTER ONE


     "In five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the salesman.

     He paused to let this planet-shattering information sink into our amazed brains. Personally, I didn't know how many more wonders I could absorb before lunch.

     "With the right promotional campaign," he went on, breathlessly, "it might take as little as two years.

     He might even have been right. Stranger things have happened in my lifetime. But I decided to hold off on calling my broker with frantic orders to sell all my jock-strap stock.

     The press conference was being held in a large auditorium belonging to United Bioengineers. It could seat about a thousand; it presently held about a fifth that number, most of us huddled together in the front rows.

     The UniBio salesman was non-nondescript as a game-show host. He had one of those voices, too. A Generic person. One of these days they'll standardize every profession by face and body type. Like uniforms.

     He went on:

     "Sex as we know it is awkward, inflexible, unimaginative. By the time you're forty, you've done everything you possibly could with our present, 'natural' sexual system. In fact, if you're even moderately active, you've done everything a dozen times. It's become boring. And if it's boring at forty, what will it be like at eighty, or a hundred and forty? Have you ever thought about that? About what you'll be doing for a sex life when you're eighty? Do you really want to be repeating the same old acts?"

     "Whatever I'm doing, it won't be with him," Cricket whispered in my ear.

     "How about with me?" I whispered back. "Right after the show."

     "How about after I'm eighty?" She gave me a sharp little jab in the ribs, but she was smiling. Which is more than I could say for the hulk sitting in front of us. He worked for Perfect Body, weighed about two hundred kilos--none of it fat--and was glaring over the slope of one massive trapezius, flexing the muscles in his eyebrows. I wouldn't have believed he could even turn his head, much less look over his shoulder. You could hear the gristle popping.

     We took the hint and shut up.

     "At United Bioengineers," the pitch went on, "we have no doubt that, given twenty or thirty million years, Mother Nature would have remedied some of these drawbacks. In fact," and here he gave a smile that managed to be sly and aw-shucks at the same time, "we wonder if the grand old lady might have settled on this very System . . . that's how good we think it is.

     "And how good is that? I hear you saying. There have been a lot of improvements since the days of Christine Jorgensen. What makes this one so special?"

     "Christine who?" Cricket whispered, typing rapidly with the fingers of her right hand on her left forearm.

     "Jorgensen. First male-to-female sex change, not counting opera singers. What are they teaching you in journalism school these days?"

     "Get the spin right, and the factoids will follow. Hell, Hildy, I didn't realize you dated the lady."

     "I've done worse since. If she hadn't kept trying to lead on the dance floor . . . "

     This time an arm--it had to be an arm, it grew out of his shoulder, though I could have put both my legs into one of his sleeves--hooked itself over the back of the chair in front of me, and I was treated to the whole elephantine display, from the crew-cut yellow hair to the jaw you could have used to plow the south forty, to the neck wider than Cricket's hips. I held up my hands placatingly, pantomimed locking up my lips and throwing away the key. His brow beetled even more-- god help me if he thought I was making fun of him-- then he turned back around. I was left wondering where he got the tiny barbells he must have used to get those forehead muscles properly pumped up.

     In a word, I was bored.

     I'd seen the Sexual Millennium announced before. As recently as the previous March, in fact, and quite regularly before that. It was like end-of-the-world stories, or perpetual motion machines. A journalist figured to encounter them every few weeks as long as his career lasted. I suspect it was the same when headlines were chiseled into stone tablets and the Sunday Edition was tossed from the back of a woolly mammoth. I had lost track of how many times I'd sat in audiences just like this, listening to a glib young man/woman with more teeth than God intended proclaim the Breakthrough of the Age. It was the price a feature reporter had to pay.

     It could have been worse. I could have had the political beat.

     " . . . tested on over two thousand volunteer subjects . . . random sampling error of plus or minus one percent . . . "

     I was having a bad feeling. That the story would not be one hundredth as revolutionary as the guy was promising was a given. The only question was, would there be enough substance to hack out a story I could sell to Walter?

     " . . . registered a sixty-three percent increase in orgasmic sensation, a two to one rise in the satisfaction index, and a complete lack of post-coital depression."

     And as my old uncle J. Walter Thompson used to say, makes your wash fifty percent whiter, cleans your teeth, and leaves your breath alone.

     I reached down to the floor and recovered the faxpad each of us had been given as we came through the door. I called up the survey questions and scanned through them quickly. My bullshit detector started beeping so loudly I was afraid Mister Dynamic Tension would turn around again.

     The questions were garbage. There are firms whose purpose is to work with pollsters and guard against the so-called "brown-nose effect," that entirely human tendency to tell people what they want to hear. Ask folks if they like your new soda pop, they'll tend to say yes, then spit it out when your back is turned. UniBio had not hired one of these firms. Sometimes that in itself indicates a lack of confidence in the product.

     "And now, the moment you've been waiting for." There was a flourish of trumpets. The lights dimmed. Spotlights swirled over the blue velvet drapes behind the podium, which began to crawl toward the wings with the salesman aboard.

     "United Bioengineers presents--"

     "Drum roll," Cricket whispered, a fraction of a second early. I hit her with my elbow.

     "--the future of sex . . . ULTRA-Tingle!"

     There was polite applause and the curtains parted to reveal a nude couple standing, embracing, beneath a violet spot. Both were hairless. They turned to face us, heads high, shoulders back. Neither seemed to be male or female. The only real distinction between them was the hint of breasts and a touch of eye shadow on the smaller one. There was flat, smooth skin between each pair of legs.

     "Another touchie-feelie," Cricket said. "I thought this was going to be all new. Didn't they introduce the Tingle system three years ago?"

     "They sure did. Paid a fortune to get half a dozen celebs to convert, and they still didn't get more than ten, twenty thousand subscribers. I doubt there's a hundred of them left."

     What can you do? They hold a press conference, we have to send somebody. They throw chum in the water, we start to feed.

     Five minutes into the ULTRA-Tingle presentations (that's how they insisted it be spelled, with caps) I could see this turkey would be of interest only to the trades. I'm sure my beefy buddy up front was tickled down to the tips of his muscle-bound toes.

     There were a dozen nude, genderless dancers on stage now, caressing each others' bodies and posing artistically. Blue sparks flew from their fingertips.

     "That's it for me," I said to Cricket. "You sticking around?"

     "There's a drawing later. Three free conversions--"

     "--to the fabulous ULTRA-Tingle System," the salesman said, finishing her sentence for her.

     "Win free sex," I said.

     "What's that?"

     "Walter says it's the ultimate padloid headline."

     "Shouldn't it have something about UFO's in it?"

     "Okay. 'Win Free Sex Aboard a UFO to Old Earth.'"

     "I'd better stick around for the drawing. My boss would kill me if I won and wasn't around to collect."

     "If I win, they can bring it around to the office." I got up, put my hand on a massive shoulder, leaned down.

     "Those pecs could use some more work," I told the gorilla hybrid, and got out in a hurry.

     #

     The foyer had been transformed since my arrival. Huge blue holos of ULTRA-Tingle convertees entwined erotically in the corners, and long banquet tables had been wheeled in. Men in traditional English butler uniforms stood behind the tables polishing silver and glassware.

     It's known as perks. I seldom turn down a free trip in the course of my profession, and I never turn down free food.

     I went to the nearest table and stuck a knife into a pАte' sculpture of Sigmund Freud and spread the thick brown goo over a slice of black bread. One of the butlers looked worried and started toward me, but I glared him back into his place. I put two thick slices of smoked ham on top of the pАte', spread a layer of cream cheese, a few sheets of lox sliced so thin you could read newsprint through it, and topped it all off with three spoonfuls of black Beluga caviar. The butler watched the whole operation in increasing disbelief.

     It was one of the all-time great Hildy sandwiches.

     I was about to bite into it when Cricket appeared at my elbow and offered me a tulip glass of blue champagne. The crystal made an icy clear musical note when I touched it to the rim of her glass.

     "Freedom of the press," I suggested.

     "The fourth estate," Cricket agreed.

     #

     The UniBio labs were at the far end of a new suburb nearly seventy kilometers from the middle of King City. Most of the slides and escalators were not working yet. There was only one functioning tube terminal and it was two kilometers away. We'd come in a fleet of twenty hoverlimos. They were still there, lined up outside the entrance to the corporate offices, ready to take us back to the tube station. Or so I thought. Cricket and I climbed aboard.

     "It distresses me greatly to tell you this," the hoverlimo said, "but I am unable to depart until the demonstration inside is over, or until I have a passenger load of seven individuals."

     "Make an exception," I told it. "We have deadlines to meet."

     "Are you perhaps declaring an emergency situation?"

     I started to do just that, then bit my tongue. I'd get back to the office, all right, then have a lot of explaining to do and a big fine to pay.

     "When I write this story," I said, trying another tack, "and when I mention this foolish delay, portraying UniBio in an unfavorable light, your bosses will be extremely upset."

     "This information disturbs and alarms me," said the hoverlimo. "I, being only a sub-program of an incompletely-activated routine of the UniBio building computer, wish only to please my human passengers. Be assured I would go to the greatest lengths to satisfy your desires, as my only purpose is to provide satisfaction and speedy transportation. However," it added, after a short pause, "I can't move."

     "Come on," Cricket said. "You ought to know better than to argue with a machine." She was already getting out. I knew she was right, but there is a part of me that has never been able to resist it, even if they don't talk to me.

     "Your mother was a garbage truck," I said, and kicked it in the rubber skirt.

     "Undoubtedly, sir. Thank you, sir. Please come back soon, sir."

     #

     "Who programmed that toadying thing?" I wondered, later.

     "Somebody with a lot of lipstick on his ass," Cricket said. "What are you so sour about? It's just a short walk. Take in the scenery."

     It was a rather pleasant place, I had to admit. There were very few people around. You grow up with the odor of people all around you, all the time, and you really notice it when the scent is gone. I took a deep breath and smelled freshlypoured concrete. I drank the sights and sounds and scents of a new-born world: the sharp primary colors of wire bundles sprouting from unfinished walls like the first buds on a bare bough, the untarnished gleam of copper, silver, gold, aluminum, titanium; the whistle of air through virgin ducts, undeflected, unmuffled, bringing with it the crisp sharpness of the light machine oil that for centuries has coated new machinery, fresh from the factory . . . all these things had an effect on me. They meant warmth, security, safety from the eternal vacuum, the victory of humanity over the hostile forces that never slept. In a word, progress.

     I began to relax a little. We picked our way through jumbles of stainless steel and aluminum and plastic and glass building components and I felt a peace as profound as I suspect a Kansas farmer of yesteryear might have felt, looking out over his rippling fields of wheat.

     "Says here they've got an option where you can have sex over the telephone."

     Cricket had gotten a few paces ahead of me, and she was reading from the UniBio faxpad handout.

     "That's nothing new. People started having sex over the telephone about ten minutes after Alexander Graham Bell invented it."

     "You're pulling my leg. Nobody invented sex."

     I liked Cricket, though we were rivals. She works for The Straight Shit, Luna's second largest padloid, and has already made a name for herself even though she's not quite thirty years old. We cover many of the same stories so we see a lot of each other, professionally.

     She'd been female all the time I'd known her, but she'd never shown any interest in the tentative offers I had made. No accounting for taste. I'd about decided it was a matter of sexual orientation--one doesn't ask. It had to be that. If not, it meant she just wasn't interested in me. Altogether unlikely.

     Which was a shame, either way, because I'd harbored a low-grade lust for her for three years.

     "'Simply attach the Tinglemodem (sold separately) to the primary sensory cluster,'" she read, "'and it's as if your lover were in the room with you.' I'll bet Mr. Bell didn't figure on that."

     Cricket had a child-like face with an upturned nose and a brow that tended to wrinkle appealingly when she was thinking--all carefully calculated, I have no doubt, but no less exciting because of that. She had a short upper lip and a long lower one. I guess that doesn't sound so great, but Cricket made it work. She had one green, normal eye, and the other one was red, without a pupil. My eyes were the same except the normal one was brown. The visible red eyes of the press never sleep.

     She was wearing a frilly red blouse that went well with her silver-blonde hair, and the second badge of our profession: a battered gray fedora with a card reading PRESS stuck into the brim. She had recently had herself heeled. It was coming back into fashion. Personally, I tried it and didn't like it much. It's a simple operation. The tendons in the soles of the feet are shortened, forcing your heels up in the air and shifting the weight to the balls of the feet. In extreme cases it put you right up on your toes, like a ballerina. Like I said, a rather silly fad, but I had to admit it produced attractive lines in the calf, thigh, and buttock muscles.

     It could have been worse. Women used to cram their feet into pointed horrors with tencentimeter heels and hobble around in a one-gee field to get more or less the same effect. It must have been crippling.

     "Says there's a security interlock available, to insure fidelity."

     "What? Where's that?"

     She gave me the faxpad reference. I couldn't believe what I was reading.

     "Is that legal?" I asked her.

     "Sure. It's a contract between two people, isn't it? Nobody's forced to use it."

     "It's an electronic chastity belt, that's what it is."

     "Worn by both husband and wife. Not like the brave knight off to the Crusades, getting laid every night while his wife looks for a good locksmith. Good for the goose, good for the gander."

     "Good for nobody, if you ask me."

     Frankly, I was shocked, and not much shocks me. To each his or her own, that's basic to our society. But ULTRA-Tingle was offering a coded security system whereby each partner had a password, unknown to the other, to lock or unlock his or her partner's sexual response. Without the password, the sexual center of the brain would not be activated, and sex would be about as exciting as long division.

     To use it would require giving someone veto power over my own mind. I can't imagine trusting anyone that much. But people are crazy. That's what my job's all about.

     "How about over there?" Cricket said.

     "Over where? I mean, what about it?" She was headed toward a patch of green, an area that, when completed, would be a pocket park. Trees stood around in pots. There were great rolls of turf stacked against one wall, like a carpet shop.

     "It's probably the best spot we'll find."

     "For what?"

     "Have you forgotten your offer already?" she asked.

     To tell the truth, I had. After this many years, it had been made more in jest than anything else. She took my hand and led me onto an unrolled section of turf. It was soft and springy and cool. She reclined and looked up at me.

     "Maybe I shouldn't say it, but I'm surprised."

     "Well, Hildy, you never really asked, you know?"

     I felt sure I had, but maybe she was right. My style is more to kid around, make what used to be known as a pass. Some women don't like that. They'd rather have a direct question.

     I stretched out on top of her and we kissed.

     We disarranged some of my clothes. She wasn't wearing enough to worry about. Soon we were moving to rhythms it had taken Mother Nature well over a billion years to compose. It was awkward, messy, it lacked flexibility and probably didn't show much imagination. It sure wasn't ULTRATingle. That didn't prevent it from being wonderful.

     "Wow," she whispered, as I rolled off her and we lay side by side on the grass. "That was really . . . obsolete."

     "Not nearly as obsolete as it was for me."

     We looked at each other and burst out laughing.

     After a while, she sat up and glanced at the figures displayed on her wrist.

     "Deadline in three hours," she said.

     "Me, too." We heard a low hum, looked up, and saw our old friend the hoverlimo headed in our direction. We ran to catch it, leaped over the rubber skirt and landed with seven others, who grumbled and groused and eventually made room for us.

     "I am overjoyed to transport you," said the hoverlimo.

     "I take that back about the garbage truck," I said.

     "Thank you, sir."


     =*= =*= =*= =*=
CHAPTER TWO


     This is not a mystery story. The people you will meet along the way are not suspects. The things that happen to them are not clues. I promise not to gather everyone together at the end and dramatically denounce a culprit.

     This is not an adventure story. The survival of the universe will not be thrown into jeopardy during the course of it. Some momentous events will occur, and I was present at some of them but, like most of us, I was simply picked up by the tornado of history and deposited, like Judy Garland, in a place I never expected to be. I had little or no hand in the outcome. In fact, this being real life and not an adventure story, it can be said there has been no outcome. Some things will change, and some will remain the same, and most things will simply go on as they were. If I were a writer of adventure fiction, if I were manufacturing myself as the adventure's protagonist, I would certainly have placed myself in the center of more of the plot's turning points. I would have had myself plunging into peril, fighting mighty battles, and saving humanity, or something like that. Instead, many of the most important things I'm going to tell you about happened far from my sight. I just tried to stay alive . . .

     Don't expect me to draw my sword and set things aright. Even if I had a sword and knew how to use it, I seldom saw an unambiguous target, and when I thought I did it was too large and too far away for my puny swordsmanship to have any effect.

     This is not a nuts-and-bolts story. Here you will find--among many other howlers--the Hildy Johnson Explanation of Nanobots, their uses, functions, and methods of working. I'm sure much of it is wildly inaccurate, and all of it is surely written about fifty I.Q. points below the layman's level . . . and so what? If you want a nuts-and-bolts story, there have been many written about the events I will describe. Or you could always read the instruction manual.

     Maybe the nanobot stuff could have come out, but I will also deal with the central technological conundrum of our time: that undeniably sentient, great big spooky pile of crystalline gray matter, wonderful humanitarian, your friend and mine, the Central Computer. That was unavoidable, but I will say it once and you'd do well to remember it: I am not a tech. The things I have to say about matters cybernetic should be taken with an asteroid-sized tablet of sodium chloride. Literally thousands of texts have been written concerning how what happened happened, and why it can't happen again, to any degree of complexity you're capable of handling, so I refer the interested reader to them, and good riddance. But I will divulge to you a secret, because if you've come this far with me I can't help but like you: take what those techs say with a grain of salt, too. Nobody knows what's going on with the CC.

     So I've told you what kind of story this isn't. Well, what is it?

     That's always harder to say. I thought of calling it How I Spent the Bicentennial Year, but where's the sex in that? Where's the headline appeal? I could have called it To The Stars! That remains to be seen, and it will be my intention throughout not to lie to you.

     What I was afraid it was when I began was the world's longest suicide note. It's not: I survived. Damn! I just gave away the ending. But I would hope the more astute of you had already figured that one out.

     All I can promise you is that it's a story. Things do happen. But people will behave in unrepentantly illogical ways. Mammoth events will remain resolutely off-stage. Dramatic climaxes will fizzle like wet firecrackers. Questions will go unanswered. An outline of this story would be a sorry thing to behold; any script doctor in the world could instantly suggest dozens of ways to spruce it up. Hey, have you tried outlining your own life lately?

     I will be the most illogical character of them all. I will miss opportunities where I could have made a difference, do the wrong thing, and just generally sleepwalk through some critical events in my life. I'm sorry, and I hope you all do better than I have, but I wonder if you will. I will ramble and digress. If Walter couldn't get me to stop doing that, no one could. I will inject bits of my rag-tag personal philosophy; I am an opinionated son of a bitch, or bitch, as the case may be, but when things threaten to get too heavy I will inject some inappropriate humor. Though anything one writes will have a message, I will not try too hard to sell mine to you, partly because I'm far from sure what it is.

     But you can relax on one account: this is not a metaphorical story. I will not turn into a giant cockroach, nor will I perish in existential despair. There's even some rock 'em sock 'em action, for those of you who wandered in from the Saturday Matinee. What more could you ask?

     So you've been warned. From here on in, you're on your own.

     #

     The tube capsule back to King City was a quarter full. I used the time to try to salvage something from the wasted afternoon. Looking around me, I saw that all my colleagues were busy at the same task. Eyes were rolled up, mouths hung open, here and there a finger twitched. It had to be either a day trip from the Catatonic Academy, or the modern press at work.

     Call me old-fashioned. I'm the only reporter I know who still uses his handwriter except to take notes. Cricket was young enough I doubted she'd ever had one installed. As for the rest of them, over the last twenty years I'd watched as one after the other surrendered to the seductions of Direct Interface, until only I was left, plodding along with antique technology that happened to suit me just fine.

     Okay, so I lied about the open mouths. Not all D.I. users look like retarded zombies when they interface. But they look asleep, and I've never been comfortable sleeping in public places.

     I snapped the fingers of my left hand. I had to do it twice more before the handwriter came on. That worried me; it was getting harder to find people who still knew how to work on handwriters.

     Three rows of four colored dots appeared on the heel of my left hand.

     By pressing the dots in different combinations with my fingertips I was able to write the story in shorthand, and watch the loops and lines scrawl themselves on a strip of readout skin on my wrist, just where a suicide would slash himself.

     There couldn't be that many of us left who knew Gregg. I wondered if I ought to apply for a grant under the Preservation of Vanishing Skills act. Shorthand was certainly useless enough to qualify. It was at least as obsolete as yodeling, and I'd once covered a meeting of the Yodeling Society. While I was at it, maybe I could drum up some interest in the Preservation of the Penis.

     #

     (File #Hildy*next avail.*)(code Unitingle)

     (headline to come)

     #

     How far do you trust your spouse? Or better yet, how much does your spouse trust you!

     That's the question you'll be asking yourself if you subscribe to United Bioengineers' new sex system known as ULTRA-Tingle.

     ULTRA-Tingle is the new, improved, up-dated version of UniBio's mega-flop of a few years back, known simple as Tingle. Remember Tingle? Well, don't feel bad. Nobody else does, either. Somewhere, in some remote cavern in this great dusty globe we feel sure there must be someone who converted and stayed that way. Maybe even two of them. Maybe tonight they're Tingling each other. Or maybe one of them has a tingle-ache.

     If you are a bona fide Tingler, call this padloid immediately, because you've won a prize! Ten percent off on the cost of your conversion to ULTRA-Tingle. Second prize: a discount on two conversions!

     What does ULTRA-Tingle offer the dedicated sexual adventurer? In a word: Security!

     Maybe you thought sex was between your legs. It's not. It's in your head, like everything. And that is the miracle of ULTRA-Tingle. Merely by saying the word you can have the great thrill of caponizing your mate. You, too, can be a grinning gelding. Imagine the joys of cerebral castration! Be the first in your sector to rediscover the art of psychic infibulation! Who but UniBio could raise impotence into the realm of integrated circuits, elevate frigidity from aberration to abnegation?

     You don't believe me? Here's how it works:

     (to come: *insert UniBio faxpad #4985 ref. 6- 13.*)

     You may ask yourself: Whatever happened to oldfashioned trust? Well, folks, it's obsolete. Just like the penis, which UniBio assures us will soon go the way of the Do-do bird. So those of you who still own and operate a trouser-snake, better start thinking of a place to put it.

     No, not there, you fool! That's obsolete, too!

     (no thirty)

     #

     The vocabulary warning light was blinking wildly on the nail of my index finger. It turned on around paragraph seven, as I had known it would. But it's fun to write that sort of thing, even if you know it'll never make it into print. When I first started this job I would have gone back and worked on it, but now I know it's better to leave something obvious for Walter to mess with, in the hope he'll leave the rest alone.

     Okay, so the Pulitzer Prize was safe for another year.

     #

     King City grew the way many of the older Lunar settlements had: one bang at a time.

     The original enclave had been in a large volcanic bubble several hundred meters below the surface. An artificial sun had been hung near the top, and engineers drilled tunnels in all directions, heaping the rubble on the floor, pulverizing it into soil, turning the bubble into a city park with residential corridors radiating away from it.

    

... ... ...
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Я ищу: люди, пишущие тупые анекдоты пр Яндекс и футбольные команды, не зная устройства поиска на Яндексе. Результат поиска: страниц - 194, серверов - не менее 37
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