"Brunner, John - The World Swappers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brunner John)

propulsor hanging around the stern like a patch of localized fog. The blind
panes of Counce's dark glasses turned towards the blue horizon, facing
the one point where no one else would have expected to see anything.
No one else, that is, except someone who had come to this precise place
for this precise reason.

Behind him now, though very far away, the tentacles of the
purification and extraction plants spread yearly further southward; to his
right, somewhat nearer, were the kelp farms of Pacific Nutrition; to his
left and nearer again, though still below the skyline, was the smart and
somewhat snobbish residential district of Sealand. In the direction in
which Counce faced, there was nothing for a thousand miles bar a few
scattered islands.

Then there was a gleam as if Venus had become visible in the middle
of the day and too far from the plane of the ecliptic. It was very faint,
and the sun competed with it, but the dark glasses helped, and the
distance was closing rapidly - at about twelve hundred miles an hour, he
judged.

The gleam took on form by degrees. The hull showed first, as a
darker blob; then the wings, their leading edges glowing sullen red; and


last of all the thin lines of the hydrofins. Counce nodded approval as the
spaceship slanted down toward the water. The pilot knew his job - he,
Counce, could hardly have chosen the angle of approach better himself.

The first hydrofin bit the water, and the rate of increase of the ship's
apparent size dropped abruptly. It was still more than twenty miles away,
but a vessel capable of carrying a crew of a dozen on hundred-parsec
hops could not very well be inconspicuously small.

The spray from the second layer of hydrofins turned to steam as they
touched and briefly left the water again; with a cry of tortured metal the
hot wings were suddenly struck and chilled. The ship skimmed over the
ocean, settling slowly to its normal riding attitude as it bore down on
Counce's boat. It threw out first a sea anchor, then, when its detectors
had checked the bottom profile, a tractor beam focused on the crest of
the nearest submarine peak. It came to a halt less than a half mile away.

And disappeared.

Counce sighed, taking off his dark glasses and putting them away in
the pouch of his trunks. The deck of the boat was heating up under him,
which meant that someone aboard the spaceship had put two and two
together in an unusually inspired manner. Had Bassett somehow been
warned about him? Counce thought it unlikely, but he would have to
make allowances for the possibility.