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

heavy trucks and two wheeled diggers had been stolen from the vehicle
park by the time the next guard made his round. Jim was grateful it
had happened on his weekend off, because the guards on duty that night
had been fired at once.

Pulaski yawned, stretched, then leaned back against the wall of the
hut. "Almost makes you wish for the good old days, when there was
nothing here but wilderness," he said.

"No jobs, either," said Jim sourly. "I like it just the way it is,
thanks very much."

What had happened to the town was nearly miraculous. A company that
specialized in manufacturingartificial composite "marble" and "granite"
had come to suYvey the old mine site. They had been specifically
looking for quartz. From what Jim could gather, they powdered it,
mixed it with resins, then turned it out as slabs of high-quality fake
Carrara marble for files and countertops. They had found a rich seam
of the stuff running underneath the depleted coal veins, and it had
looked like this would provide the town with at least some jobs. After
years when up to eighty percent of the population had been out of work,
it was better than nothing.

The company, Consolidated Quartzite, moved in, hired a couple of
hundred local people as both full-time and part-time labor, and began
clearing the site and sinking boreholes to find the bestmand most
economicalmway of extracting the quartz. The process had gone on
without much fanfare for several months, and the town began to take on
a slight sparkle of life. People started to eat out more than they had
for a long time, the bar began to fill up again in the evenings, they
even began talking cautiously about a return of the good times. Or at
least, as good as times were likely to get these days.

And then it happened. There was a morning when one of the Consolidated
site engineers came running from the site up

to the main office so fast that his helmet fell off halfway and he
didn't even stop to pick it up and put it back on. And this was the
man who chewed out at least three workers a day for similar
infringements of the safety regulations. He shot into the site office
like a rabbit down a burrow, dumped a pocketful of something
indeterminate all over the table, grabbed the phone, and began babbling
to someone at the head office in Nevada.

There were some abortive attempts to hush up what had happened, but in
a small town on a work site where everyone knew everyone else--and more
or less trusted everyone else as well-the truth came out fast enough.
They had struck gold.