"duane,.dianne.-.spider.man.-.octopus.agenda" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duane Diane)

sometimes too hot to touch. That was what one of the engineers had
told him. The heat wasn't just from the friction of drilling, but from
the massive heat and pressure of the earth itself two-plus miles
down.

One of the pieces of machinery made an odd gulping sound, and Jim
looked up. There was no reading of expressions

through their hoods and goggles, but there was suddenly an air of
expectation in the group.

"Nell?" said the man with the tentacles.

"She's hit bottom," replied the team member who had been operating the
crane.

' Then check the transmitter."

Another one of the team took an object from his belt. It was oblong,
with a short antenna at one end, and looked as much like a
walkie-talkie or even a cell phone as anything else. He studied it,
adjusted a couple of controls, then nodded. "We've got a good signal.
Five by five. Heat's no problem."

'When our work here is done. Drop as many cores as you can into the
shaft, and let's be away."

The group of black-clad men, no longer separate teams but a single unit
of about fifteen, swiftly set to work. They gathered the thirty or so
drilled-out core samples that had been placed near the borehole and
began feeding them back down the shaft, one after another. The first
half-dozen were reassembled into their original carriers and lowered
with almost as much care as the cylinder itself, but after that the
cores were simply rolled or carried to the top of the shaft and dropped
inside.

Even when every sample around the site had been disposed of, the shaft
was nowhere near filled to the top. It would take a lot more than that
to completely fill a hole two miles deep. But getting at the cylinder
was no longer a simple matter of reversing the winch and pulling it
out, not with the better part of two tons of rock plugging the exit.

The man with the tentacles clapped his real hands together, an
expression both of satisfaction and completion. "Let's be away."

Most of his various teams faded at once into the shadows, but

a couple of them remained with their leader as he came over to Jim and
the others. "You gentlemen will forgive me if I don't give you a
ride," he said. "But we have miles to go before we sleep."