"Zach Hughes - Mother Lode" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

An odd look took possession of the driver's face. The hydrocar slowed,
stopped. He turned to stare at her, his mouth dropping. "You don't know,
honey?"

Her heart thudded. "Know what?"

"Well, damn," he said.

"Please, what is it?" she asked.

"Honey, I hate to be the one to have to tell you, damned if I don't."

"Something has happened to my father?"

"He died just last week," the driver said.


CHAPTER TWO
 John Kenner had built his retirement home on high ground overlooking
a peripatetic river which, like many natural features on Terra II, had an
Old Earth name of lost meaning. The Canadian wound its way among
wooded, rolling hills past the line of rocky bluffs from which the Kenner
house overlooked the river and, on the far side, the ancient scars of deep
mining that had devastated the area in the Age of Exploitation. The
centuries had healed the wounds to the planet's crust, but there were
people alive who still remembered when the Canadian ran red and oily as
buried petroleum and mineral wastes were weathered to the surface. Man,
in his frantic rush to get back into space, had once again raped a planet,
although he had not, as in the case of the home planet, poisoned it fatally
with the byproducts of nuclear, chemical, and biological war.

A concerted drive to return New Earth to her original beauty had been
initiated two hundred years before Erin Kenner was born to a retired fleet
marine sergeant major who had married in middle age.

The air was sweet in the midlands of the western continent where John
Kenner had built his stone, glass, and polished wood retreat. As a part of
the rehabilitation of Terra II, billions of trees had been planted. Tough,
hardy grasses had been importedтАФafter careful studyтАФfrom distant
planets to take root in the scorched slag heaps and the scars of the deep
surface mines. A climate change that had threatened to give New Earth a
permanent overcoat of ice had been reversed.

The planet wasn't a garden spot like Delos III, but it offered privacy and
a pace of life that was less hectic than that on Xanthos or the bustling
Tigian planets. A man of modest means could own, as John Kenner did, a
tract of land stretching half a mile in three directions from the house on
the sandstone bluff overlooking the river.

"You'll always have a place to come back to, Erin," her father had told