"Bova, Ben - Death on Venus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

ten-billion-dollar prize.
And he did one other thing. He cut off my stipend, as of my twenty-fifth
birthday. On that date I became penniless.
I had loved Alex, the big brother whoТd protected me as best as he could from
FatherТs cruel disdain. I decided that I would go to Venus and find his remains.
If I was successful, I would be financially secure and independent of Father for
the rest of my life.
If I failed, I would join Alex on the red-hot surface of Venus.
I was not the only desperate one aiming for the prize money, I discovered. Lars
Fuchs, a "rock rat" from the Asteroid Belt, was also on his way to Venus. From
what Father told me, Fuchs was a monster. I had never seen my father look so
disturbed about anyone. My father hated Lars Fuchs, that was apparent. He was
also quite clearly afraid of him.
* * *
We travelled from Earth orbit to Venus orbit in a converted freighter named
Truax. Tethered to the shabby old bucket was Hesperos, the craft that we would
ride into the clouds of Venus and down to the planetТs surface. Hesperos was
small but efficient, a cross between a dirigible and submarine that would glide
through VenusТ thick clouds and carry us all the way down to the ground, where
the atmospheric pressure was about the same as the pressure of ocean water more
than a kilometer below the surface.
I had wanted Tomas Rodriguez to captain Hesperos, but Father had insisted on
putting one of his former mistresses in charge, Desiree Duchamp. Tomas
reluctantly accepted being bumped to second-in-command. Captain Duchamp, in
turn, brought her daughter along. Marguerite was a biologist, of all things. Who
needed a biologist on a planet as dead and devastated as Venus?
I soon found out two things: Captain Duchamp wanted her daughter with her
because my lecherous father had his eye on her. And Marguerite Duchamp was a
clone of her mother.
As Marguerite explained to me, "MotherТs always said sheТs never met a man sheТd
trust to father a child with her. So she cloned herself and had the embryo
implanted in herself. Eight and a half months later I was born."
It was a tense two months, going from Earth to Venus. At last the day arrived
when we were to transfer from Truax to Hesperos, leaving the old freighter in
orbit with a skeleton crew aboard her.
* * *
I took one last look at my stateroom. When we had boarded Truax the single room
had seemed rather cramped and decidedly shabby to me. Over the nine weeks of our
flight to Venus, though, IТd grown accustomed to having my office and living
quarters all contained within the same four walls--or bulkheads, as theyТre
called aboard ship. At least the smart wall screens had made the compartment
seem larger than it actually was.
Now we were ready to transfer to the much smaller Hesperos. At least, the crew
was. I dreaded the move. If Truax was like a tatty old freighter, Hesperos would
be more like a cramped, claustrophobic submarine.
To make matters worse, in order to get to the dirigible-like Hesperos we were
going to have to perform a spacewalk. I was actually going to have to seal
myself into a spacesuit and go outside into that yawning vacuum and trolley down
the cable that linked the two vessels, with nothing between me and instant death
but the monomolecular layers of my suit. I could already feel my insides