"David Drake - Men Like Us (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

Assembly. Him with a wife and six children, too! Well, don't try to bring one back here with you. They
should know better, but if one didn't, it'd be the worse for both of you." The innkeeper blew out one of
the lamps and moved toward the other.
Smith urinated in the open ditch behind the building, letting his eyes readjust to the moonglow. Then he
began to walk along the sewer with a deceptive purposelessness. In the shadow of the house nearest the
creek he paused, eyeing the nodding guards across the gorge. The traveler took off his boots. He ducked
into the ditch and used its cover to crawl down onto the creek bank.
The rock was steep, but it was limestone and weathered into irregularity enough for Smith's practiced
fingers to grip. Smoothly, but without haste, the traveler slipped along below the line of sight on the
guards at the power plant. When he reached the bridge trestles, he paused again, breathing carefully. His
hands examined the nearest of the handsawn oak timbers, tracing it from where it butted into the rock to
where it crossed another beam halfway to the stringers. Smith swung onto the trestle and
began to negotiate the gorge like an ant in a clump of heavy grass.
Any sounds the traveler might have made were muffled by the creek. Smith edged left toward the west
corner of the building. The wall there was built almost to the rim of the gorge. Smith's clothing matched
the color of the wet stone so that his outline was at least blurred for a potential watcher from the village,
but lack of alertness of the guards' part was his real defense.
Smith raised his head. Both guards were nodding in their chairs, crossbows leaning against the doorposts
beside them. The traveler swung up lithely. A step later he -was hugging the power plant's west wall. The
stone hummed.
The building was as massive a construction as anything Smith had seen created after the Blast. The walls
were dry stone, using the natural layering of limestone and their one-meter thickness to attain an adequate
seal without mortar. Their weathered seams made it easy for someone of Smith's strength and condition
to mount the five meters of blank wall to the lighted slits just below the roof. The interior was much as the
traveler had expected it to be, much as he had seen it before here and there across the face of the world.
Six huge electric motors were ranked below him. They were being used as generators, driven by a
complex pattern of shafts and broad leather belts. Only one of them was turning at the moment. When
the smelters were working at full capacity and called in turn for the maximum output of the plant, the
room would be a bedlam of machines and their attendants. Now one man and a woman were sufficient.
The light of the naphtha lanterns illuminating the chamber may have exaggerated the attendants' pallor, but
they certainly saw less of the sun than the villagers across the stream did. It was hard to believe that
control of this apparatus was left to slaves, yet it was even more unlikely that freemen who knew what
they were doing would enter the chamber below.
In the center of the north wall, built against the living rock of the mountainside, was the reactor.
Its genesis was evident, for the black hulls of ten fusion bombs were ranged along the partition wall to the
east. Smith, his head framed in the narrow window, licked his lips when he saw the bombs. They would
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no longer be weapons; the plutonium of their fission cores would have decayed beyond the capacity to
form critical mass when compacted. But those cores, taken from their cocoons of lithium hydride and the
inner baths of deuterium, could still fuel a reactor.
The latter was an ugly mass of stone blocks, overshadowed by a mantis like derrick. Steam from the
reactor drove the pistons of a crude engine. Unlike the pre-Blast electric motors, the steam engine had
been manufactured for its present purpose. Inefficient, it leaked vapor through seams and rope gaskets,
but the power to create steam from water was virtually inexhaustible on the scale required here.
Manufacturing skill and not theoretical knowledge had frequently been the brake on human progress.
Leonardo da Vinci could design a workable aircraft, but no one for four hundred years could build an