"Isaac Asimov - Nebula Stori" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asimov Isaac)

Dome, his fists clenched. He didnТt want
to give them the satisfaction of seeing
their treatment provoke him.

The Dome was on the city outskirts, near
the edge of a large plateau where the
Dreamers had built Nightingale. The
GiantТs Skeleton Mountains surrounded the
plateau, falling away from it on three
sides and rising in sheer cliffs on the
fourth, here in the north. The northern
peaks piled up higher and higher in the
distance, until they become a jagged line
against the star-dazzled sky.

The Dreamers claimed they built
Nightingale as a challenge: can you create
beauty in so forbidding a place? This was
the reason they gave. Jato had heard
others put forth, but the Dreamers denied
them.

Although his past attempts at convincing
spacers to smuggle him offplanet had
failed, he never gave up. In the distant
shadows, he saw the spacer climbing the
SquareCase, a set of stairs carved into a
cliff. The first step was one centimeter
high, the second four, the third nine, and
so on, their heights increasing as the
square of integers. The first twenty ran
parallel to the cliff, but then they
turned at a right angle and stepped into
the mountains, rising taller and taller,
until they became cliffs themselves, too
high, too dark, and too distant to
distinguish.

By the time he reached the first step of
the SquareCase, the spacer was climbing
the tenth, about the height of her waist.
She sat on it, half hidden in the dark
while she watched him. He approached
slowly and stopped on the ninth step.

"Can I do something for you?" she asked.

"I wondered if you wanted a guide to the
city." It sounded unconvincing, but it was
the best introduction he could think of.