"Colin Kapp - The Subways of Tazoo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kapp Colin)

them like the bursting of a shell, followed by three almost simultaneously in the near vicinity.
 Desperately slowly the party crawled back towards the cat, which stood as the pitifully-low
high-spot of this par-ticular area of terrain. On all sides of them now the jagged lightning cut into the
ground with burning shafts of vicious energy, like the arrows of retribution fired by some crazed
electric god. Then a shaft burned down on the cat itself. The fantastic current fused the metal into a
white-hot bauble which was ripped open by the expanding air within. Before their horrified eyes the cat
sank like a lead toy thrown on to glowing embers, and became a duty, slag-shot puddle of mixed metal
and silicates alloying with the red sand of Tazoo. Then mercifully it began to rain. Nevill turned his face to
the stinging, acrid precipitation and let out a howl of pure relief. A few seconds later they were running
like half-blinded madmen through the corrosive waters in the direc-tion of the base camp, heedless now
of the cracking lightning which had withdrawn to the edge of the rain belt. They were fortunately
within a few steps of the base when the wall of sharp, abrasive sand, whipped to fury by a fan-
tastic driving wind, bore down upon them out of the deep purples of the approaching night.


two

"Welcome to Tazoo, Lieutenant!" Colonel Nash beckoned him into the office.
Fritz explored the still-smarting skin on his face and hands, and was still painfully aware of the
puffiness around his eyes. "Thank you, Colonel. That was quite an initiation ceremony out there!"
Colonel Nash smiled fleetingly. "Unpremeditated, I assure you, but the weather is part of the reason
you're here. A ground-cat is the toughest machine available, but as you saw for yourself.it is totally
incapable of standing up to the environment. The low pH of the celestial waters conspires with the sand
to etch and tear the guts out of any transporta-tion contrivance we've yet imported to Tazoo. When you
consider atmospheric chlorine, hydrogen chloride, free sul-phuric acid and ozone, plus high humidity and
extreme ultraviolet radiation together with an additional nightly sand-blast, you can guess that corrosion
prevention is not the least of our troubles."
Fritz shuddered involuntarily.
"I must admit," said Nash, "that I haven't always seen eye to eye with you before on the
subject of unorthodox engineering, but if you can solve our transport problem I shall at least be open to
persuasion. Certainly no orthodox engineers can give us transport on Tazoo at a cost less than the total
budget for the entire enterprise."
"What facilities have we?" asked Fritz.
"On TazooтАФanything you can find. If you need anything shipped out from Terra you'll need a damn
good case to get it because of shipping costs. Certainly we can't afford to bring any more vehicles out
here. Now it's up to you to delve into your unorthodoxy and come up with something practical."
"How is the Tazoon enterprise going?" asked Fritz.
 "Slowly," said Nash, "largely because of the aforemen-tioned transport limitations. Nevill's team have
uncovered a lot of architectural monstrosities, but the real prize will come if they can find some of the
Tazoon mechanical arti-facts. If they do, and if they are one half as weird as the rest of the finds so far, it
will require all of your peculiar genius to identify and interpret them. We're expecting to find some very
unorthodox engineering from a culture which died before the end of the Pliocene period on
Terra."
"What signs are there to indicate that they had a highly scientific culture?" asked Fritz. "Surely the finds
so far don't indicate very much."
"The preliminary survey party found signs that the Tazoons had reached both of the Tazoon
satellites, and we're reasonably certain that they also reached the next planet sunward in this system
and actually established a base there."
"All this sounds highly promising," said Fritz. "But two million years is a long time. Would there be
anything left of machines and mechanisms after such a period?"