"Blish, James - Seeding Program" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

Sweeney scanned the oval mare with a mild distaste. Stand-
ing on that, he would be as conspicuous as if he'd been
planted in the middle of the Moon's Mare Crisium. He said
so.
"You've no choice," Meikiejon repeated calmly. He burped
the rockets several times. Sweeney's weight returned briefly,
tried to decide which way it wanted to throw itself, and then
went away again. The ship was now in its orbit; but whether
Meikiejon had set it up to remain put over its present co-
ordinates, or instead it was to cruise criss-cross over the whole
face of the satellite, Sweeney couldn't tell, and didn't ask.
The less he knew about that, the better.
"Well, it's a long drop," Sweeney said. "And that atmos-
phere isn't exactly the thickest in the system. I'll have to fall
in the lee of the mountain. I don't want to have to trudge a
couple of hundred miles over Howe's H."
"On the other hand," Meikiejon said, "if you come down
too close, our friends down there will spot your parachute.
Maybe it'd be better if we dropped you into the Gouge, after
all. There's so much tumbled junk down there that the radar
echoes must be tremendous -not a chance of their spotting a
little thing like a man on a parachute."
"No, thank you. There's still optical spotting, and a foil
parachute looks nothing like a rock spur, even to an Adapted
Man. It'll have to be behind the mountain, where I'm in both
optical and radar shadow at once. Besides, how could I climb
out of the Gouge onto the shelf? They didn't plant themselves
on the edge of a cliff for nothing."
"That's right," Meikiejon said. "Well, I've got the catapult
pointed. I'll suit up and join you on the hull."
"All right. Tell me again just what you're going to do while
I'm gone, so I won't find myself blowing the whistle when
you're nowhere around." The sound of a suit locker being
opened came tinnily over the intercom. Sweeney's chute har-
ness was already strapped on, and getting the respirator and
throat-mikes into place would only take a moment. Sweeney
needed no other protection.
"I'm to stay up here with all power off except maintenance
for 300 days," Meikiejon's voice, sounding more distant now,
was repeating. "Supposedly by that time you'll have worked
yourself in good with our friends down there and will know
the setup. I stand ready to get a message from you on a fixed
frequency. You're to send me only a set of code letters; I
feed them into the computer, the comp tells me what to do
and I act accordingly. If I don't hear from you after 300 days,
I utter a brief but heartfelt prayer and go home. Beyond that,
God help me, I don't know a thing."
"That's plenty," Sweeney told him. "Let's go."
Sweeney went out his personal airlock. Like all true inter-
planetary craft, Meikiejon's ship had no overall hull. She con-