"David Brin - Tank Farm Dynamo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

Tank Farm Dynamo

a short story by David Brin
Copyright й 1983, by David Brin. All rights reserved. No duplication or resale without permission.

1.
"They finally fired Bylinsky."
I was up to my knees in agrisludge, a frothy brown mess at the bottom of my personal
greenhouse tank, when I heard the remark. For a moment I thought I had imagined it.
Your hearing plays tricks when you're wading around in mucky water, barely held to the
floor by under a hundredth of a gee. I was groping in the goo, trying to find whatever had
gummed up the aspirator. My breath blew up little green and brown droplets that hovered in
front of my face for long seconds before slowly settling down again.
"Ralph! Did you hear me? I said Bylinsky's out!"
I looked up this time. Don Ishido, our communications and operations chief, hung halfway
through the aft hatch of the greenhouse, twenty meters away. He was watching my reaction,
maybe in order to report to the others exactly how I took the news. Probably there was
money riding on it.
I nodded. "Thanks, Don. Bylinsky's days were numbered. We'll miss him, but we'll survive."
Ishido smiled faintly. He must have bet on my poker face. "What do you want me to tell
the others, boss?"
I shrugged. "We're still a tank farm. We buy 'em and store 'em and later we'll all get rich
selling 'em back for a profit."
"Even when they cut the water ration?"
"There'll be a way. We're in the future business. Now get out of here and let me finish my
recreational farming."
Don smirked at my euphemism, but withheld comment. He ducked out, leaving me alone to
my "recreation"... and my worries.
After clearing a clump of gelatinized algae from the input ports, I climbed onto one of the
catwalk longerons rimming the pond and turned on the bubbler. The air began to fill with tiny
superoxygenated green droplets.
I took a leap and sailed across the huge chamber to alight near the exit hatch. There I
stowed my waders and looked around the greenhouse to make sure it was ready.
In the ten years I've been living in tanks I doubt I've ever entered or left one without
blinking at least once in awe. The hatch was at one end of a metal cylinder as long as a
ten-story building is tall, with the diameter of a small house. The walls were stiffened with
aluminum baffles which once kept a hundred tons of liquid hydrogen from sloshing under high
stress. That ribwork now held my greenhouse ponds.
The former hydrogen tank had a volume of over fifty thousand cubic feet. It, and its
brothers, were just about the largest things ever put into space. And this one was all mine --
my own huge garden to putter around in during off-duty hours, growing new types of
spaceadapted algae and yeasts.
I passed through the yard-wide hatch into the intertank area between the two main
section of the External Tank. In the middle the intertank was only four feet across. The hatch
closed.
Looking back into the garden tank through a tinted port, I pressed a button to let the
sunshine in.
A bright point of light blossomed at the opposite end of the cylinder, mirror-focused
sunlight speared through a fused quartz window to strike the cloud of rising bubbles.
I stayed long enough to watch the rainbows form.