"L Ron Hubbard - Mission Earth 03 - The Enemy Within" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hubbard L. Ron)

"I'm studying gold mines along the New England coast," said Heller.
"Oh, hell, you must be a fan of old Cap Duggan," said the clerk. "Cap!" The clerk pointed,
"Go on in there and wake him up. He'll chew your ear for hours."
Heller went in. An old man was sorting charts.
Heller told him what he wanted. "Yeah," he said, "I wrote a book on colonial mines and
minerals once. Nobody ever read it though. The publisher sent me a bill. Sit down."
Cap Duggan, being a government employee, was not pushed for time and he proceeded to tell
Heller the story of his life. He was a surveyor, too old to push a transit anymore, and put out to
grass pending retirement. Heller heard all about the Seven Cities of Cibola and lost mines and
Indian fights, and they went out and Heller bought him a lunch and then heard all about Alaska and
the Klondike and the days of '49. Aside from the fact that it was all about goldтАФwhich never fails
to interestтАФI could not see how Custer's Last Stand really was caused by gold in the Black Hills.
But Heller just sat there lapping it all up.
Three solid hours and a lunch and they got down to absolutely nothing!
Finally old Cap Duggan ran out of steam and decided to discuss the subject to hand. "These
are what you are looking for, young fellow," he said as he managed to wrestle open a huge drawer.
"They're photostats of charts that are in National Archives down in Washington."
They were bad copies of charts that must have been so old and stained in the first place that
not even the originals could have been made out.
Cap Duggan spread some out. "They're colonial surveys. See here? This top one was done by
George Washington himself. The scale is all perverted on most of them as the original charter
companies was trying to convince the king they had less than they wanted, but you can make them
out."
Heller was going over them with a microscopic eye. He found one marked Connecticut. "Hey," he
said suddenly, "here's a creek named 'Goldmine'! Empties into the Atlantic. Right thereтАФonly
twenty or thirty miles northeast from where we are right now!"
"So 'tis," said Cap Duggan. "Probably some local name."
"Can I see the current charts of that area?"
Cap Duggan got them. "Well, well," he said. "It's on the current chart, too. Look, there's
even some mineral indicators. Oh, yeah. I know that place. Lost mine. Never found. I remember
about forty years ago somebody that was adjusting boundaries around there. Probably never was a
mine, just somebody's idea to attract colonists or something. Now look, way up to the northeast of
there, almost in the middle of the state, there's a real mineтАФnear Portland, Connecticut. The
Strickland Quarry. Lot of rock hounds go there. There's also quarries at Roxbury, Branchville,
East Hampton and Old Mystic right down on the coast. They dig gemstones, garnets and such like.
Lot of stuff like that in Connecticut. Just drive up to Westchester and get on the New England
ThruwayтАФthat's really U.S. 95тАФand have at it. Connecticut's awful pretty this time of year. I
wished I wasn't stuck in this God (bleeped) office! Well, I'll be retired soon and they'll let me
out of the cage."
Heller bought a stack of maps down to the tiniest sections. He also bought twenty copies of
Cap Duggan's bookтАФautographed! And really left the old man beaming.


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When he left, he made one more stop. At a flower shop. He ordered that, every day, Miss
Simmons was to get a bunch of beautiful flowers in the hospital.
He got back on the subway and very soon was sitting in High Library again. Bang-Bang came in
from a tape-recorder pickup and planting, Heller's sneaky way to avoid attending classes.