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

the ship past the entrance. The ponderous door stopped retreating directly in front of them and began to slide to one
side within the inner wall of the great tube. The vessel dropped below it. Broward, looking at a screen which gave a
view of the exterior from above, saw the door move ponderously but swiftly from the wall, then begin to move
upwards, to reseal the opening.
The ship was stopped from further descent by a metal floor, but around them, piercing the walls, were four
openings each large enough to admit a vessel twice the size of theirs. Moshe chose the one straight ahead of him; the
forward beams showed them that the tunnel dipped sharply downwards. They followed this decline for perhaps 350
meters, then were floating on the surface of the water, and they were in a blaze of lights.
"Here's where we get out," said Moshe. He lifted the ship from the water and deposited it on the other side of
one of the dozen docking berths. All of these were occupied by a vessel. Broward checked the radiation meter and
found what he had expected. A background normal for this level.
"Do you suppose that there could still be people living down here?" he said.
"Why not?" replied Moshe. "If what you told me was valid, there were quite a few personnel here. The
question is, did they stay here?"
A few minutes later, they left the ship. They were clad in coveralls and carried only automatics as weapons
and a small gravity-propelled blaster for drilling in case they encountered any doors that refused to open to normal
means. Near the entrance to a tunnel leading inwards was a small car, a Siberian Voluto. It was ready to go, so the two
climbed in with Moshe at the controls. He found that it could not be lifted more than seven centimeters off the floor;
evidently, it had a governor on the motor. He began to drive it down the tunnel, which was identified by Arabic
numerals and Cyrillic characters. Broward, comparing these against the map given him by Scone, quickly found where
they were and where they were going. At the first junction they came to, he directed Moshe to take the tunnel to the
extreme left. Moshe obeyed, and they shot down it at top speed, 20 kilometers per hour. On either side of the tunnel
were doors, all shut.
"I'd say everybody had left if it weren't for those ships in the dock," said Moshe. "So, where is everybody?"
"Mass suicide?" said Broward. "Not likely. There'd be a few that would live as long as they could draw a
breath." Moshe shouted and stabbed his finger at a button and the little car stopped. Ahead of them, a plate of plastic
had dropped down and completely blocked the tunnel. And the rear view mirror showed that the same thing had
happened behind them.
"Good thing we brought the driller," said Moshe. He started to climb out of the car but stopped when a voice
blared at them.
"Drop your weapons on the floor. Go to the shield nearest you; face it; raise your hands in the air. Remain
immobile until you are told otherwise!"
The voice, coming from a loudspeaker located somewhere in the wall, spoke in the East Siberian Russian
dialect. The two men loosened their belts, dropped them, and then proceeded to obey directions. No sooner had they
faced the plastic wall than it rose to reveal four men on the other side. These held guns pointed at the two.
"Boris Voget!" said Moshe. "Don't you remember me, Yamanuchi?"
Voget, a tall gangling man with a Lincolnesque face, smiled and said, "Surely, it can't be the Japanese Jew?
Moshe Yamanuchi! But I thought that you..."
 "I was on the Moon," Moshe said.
"Then what are you doing here?" said Voget. His smile was gone.
"I was sent by the commander of the surviving Soviet forces on the moon," replied Moshe. "He..." and
Moshe hesitated.
Broward guessed why he did not know what to say next. Should he tell them that his sole reason for being
here was to obtain the planet-shaker, that he had thought that every living thing on Earth was dead? What if these
people here did not care to place themselves under the disposition of Scone? The Siberians were famous for their
desire for independence, their underground movements. The experiment conducted by the Russians in transporting
enormous numbers from every place in the world to settle here had been successful in that the colonists had
succeeded in making the area a fertile one. But they had brought with them an anti-Russian feeling that had not died
out in their descendants.
Perhaps, thought Broward, if they knew that a North American now held the whiphand on the moon, the