"Jeff Hecht - The Crystal Highway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hecht Jeff)

"Colors? What does a physicist need with colors?"
"Wavelength is the properly quantitative word. The crystal makes the
wavelength I need to make electrons spin a certain way in iron atoms."
"Do you have the crystal? May I see it? It may be all I can see of
Vaxila's world until I get there."
Hannah turned, and the morning sun reached through the leaves to make a
pattern of light and dark on her face. "I'll show it to you if you will marry
me instead of Vaxila."
It was not the first time she had asked in the three years they had
lived together, but as always Axel was afraid. "I don't want to marry her,
Hannah. It's her words that I love. She's probably dead; her book of poems
appeared over 50 years ago."
"I think you will marry me when you come back, Axel Cormier," she
insisted. "But I don't know why I think that, or why I put up with you."
Axel searched his memory for some notable poetic quote as they walked
to her laboratory, but no words came.
****
_Lambrechtite_: a crystal containing uranium in its +5 valence state in
an unusual matrix rich in chromium, iron, lead and magnesium. When illuminated
by ultraviolet light, the uranium fluoresces brightly in the indigo part of
the spectrum. The precise wavelength is difficult to produce at reasonable
power levels by other means, and the crystals are prized by spectroscopists.
Known only from a single large outcrop, on Lambrecht Station. The crystal
formed at the bottom of a long-vanished sea of unknown composition
approximately 200 million years ago. Successful synthesis has not been
reported. -- _Minerals of the 12,000 Planets_
****
Hannah gave Axel a book on exotic minerals the morning he left for the
Starport. It puzzled him until, on the ship, he found three pages on
Lambrechtite. A color plate showed a small crystal. Beside it, Hannah had
written in her precise hand, "The printing process cannot reproduce the exact
color. Tell me what it looks like on the planet. I miss you. Love, Hannah."
Axel endured the trip, reading most of the time. Hannah's book told how
minerals were mined on distant planets. It said Lambrecht Station was a mining
colony on a lifeless planet, with air so corrosive it could eat through a
spacesuit in hours. He turned to Vaxila's _HUNDRED POEMS_, and read how light
shining through breaks in the deadly clouds brought the Crystal Highway to
glittering life. And he turned to the picture of the crystal, but stared
instead Hannah's words.
He left old Earth on a huge starship full of travelers who talked of
new lives, great business deals, or fantastic vacations, trying to convince
themselves that their missions were worth two boring weeks in cramped
quarters. He spent another week on a smaller passenger ship, but the only way
to Lambrecht Station was on a freighter that brought supplies to the planet.
"What can you tell me about Lambrecht Station?" Axel asked the captain,
a small blond woman whose hands were always busy with a long necklace of
smooth gray stones. Her sister was the rest of the crew, and except for the
necklace and the different insignias on their uniforms, Axel could not tell
them apart.
"It is dangerous," the captain said. "The air corrodes our ship, even