"Geoffrey A. Landis - Betting on Eureka" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

Betting on Eureka
by Geoffrey A. Landis
Geoffrey Landis spent most of last year in Pasadena, working on the science
team for the Mars Exploration Rover, where he shepherded the rovers
around on Mars and took pictures of rocks, soil, and sunsets. His latest work
has been a proposal for flying an aircraft in the atmosphere of Venus to
search for microbial life. In his spare time, Geoff designs solar cells and
sometimes writes science fiction.
****
Eureka.
Across the big black sky, everybody knew about the Eureka asteroid. Eureka
was a legend, a dream, a paradox; it was a fabled lost treasure hidden among a
billion rocks in the sky.
In the gossip of the rock-rats and fuel-stop jocks, many claimed that Eureka
was a hoax. The ore sample had to be an elaborate fake, because it was well known
that asteroids have no ore veins. An ore vein is deposited by water, and for four
billion years, the asteroids had never been wet. But yet there it was, an angular chunk
of rock the size of a suit-helmet. The sample had one flat surface, still showing the
saw marks where it had been cut free of its parent rock. And embedded in that
cutaway, like a rope of twisted metal, was a streak of quartz glistening with gold and
copper and scandium, precious scandium, riches without price.
But the parent body, ah, the parent body, the treasure load of manтАЩs greed
and desire, where was it? Only two people had ever seen it, only two had ever
mapped its eccentric orbit, and only one of them had come back, dying of radiation
poisoning, delirious with the last stutterings of dying neurons. He had been dying,
John Jason Goya, covered in filth and vomit that he had been too weak to clean up,
riding in a broken spaceship from who-knew-where, clutching a stone and gibbering
that it had been cut from a fifty million-ton rock, a rock threaded through and
through with the same rich veins.
But, in that last day, the one long bleak day after John Jason Goya had arrived
at High Freehold in the dilapidated Queen of Spades and before he lapsed into the
coma from which he would never recover, he refused to tell anyone where the rock
had been found. A dozen prospectors searched the Queen of Spades from rockets
to radiators and back again, tore apart the old Queen and searched her innards with
microscopes, but all the navigation logs had been erased, the inertial navigation unit
wiped, and every hint of its trajectory meticulously destroyed, lest the claim jumpers
that John Jason knew were waiting might find and steal his precious rock. John Jason
Goya alone had returned with the secret, and John Jason Goya had died with it.
Of his partner, Shania Montez, no trace was ever found.
 Yeah, everybody knew the story. Parts of it were most likely true, parts
undoubtedly exaggerated. The rock itself was on display in a museum on Earth, we
heard, or it had been processed for its precious elements and the slag discarded.
The story of Eureka faded into myth, joining the many legends of the asteroid
belts, the stories of ghost ships and lost lodes that had become the bait for a
hundred scams. Every visitor fresh from Earth was approached by a dozen furtive
con artists who, for a small price, could reveal the orbital parameters for the
fabulous lode. Nobody paid attention.
The belts had plenty of stories. IтАЩd heard that one Corwin Teron was peddling
stories that he had a guaranteed-true tip on a lost lode in the outer fringe, and I paid
no attention.