"Philip Jose Farmer - Tongues of the Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

Scone took his ship up against the face of the cliff until she was just below the top. Here the cliff was thin
because of the slope on the other side. And here, hidden from view of the Russians, he drove a tongue two decimeters
wide through the rock.
And, at the moment three Russian destroyers hurtled over the edge, tongues of compressed light lashing out
on every side in the classic flailing movement, Scone's beam broke through the cliff.
The three empty USAF ships, on automatic, shot upwards at a speed that would have squeezed their human
occupants into jellyтАФif they had had occupants. Their tongues shot out and flailed, caught the Russian tongues.
Then, the American vessels rammed into the Russians, drove them upwards, flipped them over. And all six
craft fell along the cliff's face, Russian and American intermingled, crashing into each other, bouncing off the sheer
face, exploding, their fragments colliding, and smashed into the bottom of the canyon.
Scone did not see this, for he had completed the tongue through the tunnel, turned it off for a few seconds,
and sent a video beam through. He was just in time to see the big battle-bird start to float off the ground where it had
been waiting. Perhaps, it had not accompanied the destroyers because of Russian contempt for American ability. Or,
perhaps, because the commander was under orders not to risk the big ship unless necessary. Even now, the
Lermontov rose slowly as if it might take two paths: over the cliff or towards the Zemlya. But, as it rose, Scone applied
full power.
Some one, or some detecting equipment, on the Lermontov must have caught view of the tongue as it slid
through space to intercept the battlebird. A tongue shot out towards the American beam. Then Scone's was in contact
with the hull, and a hole appeared in the irradiated plastic.
Majestically, the Lermontov continued risingтАФand so cut itself almost in half. And, majestically, it fell.
Not before the Russian commander touched off all the missiles aboard his ship in a last frenzied defense, and
the missiles flew out in all directions. Two hit the slope, blew off the face of the mountain on the Lermontov's side, and
a jet of atomic energy flamed out through the tunnel created by Scone.
But he had dropped his craft like an elevator, was halfway down the cliff before the blasts made his side of
the mountain tremble.
Half an hour later, the base of Eratosthenes sued for peace. For the sake of human continuity, said Panchurin,
all fighting must cease forever on the Moon.
The Chinese, who had been silent up to then despite their comrades' pleas for help, also agreed to accept the
policy of Nationalism.
Now, Broward expected Scone to break down, to give way to the strain. He would only have been human if he
had done so.
He did not. Not, at least, in anyone's presence. Broward awoke early during a sleep-period. Unable to forget
the dream he had just had, he went to find Ingrid Nashdoi. She was not in her lab; her assistant told him that she had
gone to the dome with Scone.
Jealous, Broward hurried there and found the two standing there and looking up at the half-Earth. Ingrid was
holding a puppy in her arms. This was one of the few animals that had been taken unharmed from the shattered tanks
of the fallen Zemlya.
Broward, looking at them, thought of the problems that faced the Moon people. There was that of
government, though this seemed for the moment to be settled. But he knew that there would be more conflict between
the bases and that his own promotion of the Athenian ideology would cause grave trouble.
There was also the problem of women. One woman to every three men. How would this be solved? Was there
any answer other than heartaches, frustration, hate, even murder?
"I had a dream," said Broward to them. "I dreamed that we on the Moon were building a great tower which
would reach up to the Earth and that was our only way to get back to Earth. But everybody spoke a different tongue,
and we couldn't understand each other. Therefore, we kept putting the bricks in the wrong places or getting into
furious but unintelligible argument about construction."
He stopped, saw they expected more, and said, "I'm sorry. That's all there was. But the moral is obvious."
"Yes," said Ingrid, stroking the head of the wriggling puppy. She looked up at Earth, close to the horizon.
"The physicists say it'll be two hundred years before we can go back. Do you realize that, barring accident or war, all
three of us might live to see that day? That we might return with our great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren?