"Keith Laumer & Eric Flint - Future Imperfect" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

an uproar when he sprang his punch line, senators jumping up and yelling, M.P.'s
everywhere, old Admiral Conaghy red in the faceтАФ"
"You're wandering," I reminded him. "Get to the point."
"The crust of the earth was slipping, he told them. Polnac, that was his name. Some
kind of big shot from Hungary. The South Polar ice cap building up, throwing the
machinery out of kilter. Eccentric thrust started the lithosphere sliding. He said it had
slipped more than four miles then. Estimated it would hit an equilibrium at about a
thousand. Take about two yearsтАФ"
"I read the papersтАФor I did while there were any papers to read."
"Conaghy got the floor. Hit the South Pole with everything we had, he said; bust up
the icecap. He scribbled on the back of an envelope and said fifty super-H's would do the
job."
"They'd have loaded the atmosphere with enough radioactivity to sterilize the planet."
"No, might've worked. Propaganda. Scared of the Russkis, what they'd do. I missed
out on the rest. They cleared the hearing room then. But I heard rumors later they'd put it
to Koprovin and he said that at the first sign of a nuclear launch he'd hit us with his whole
menagerie." The hollow eyes closed; a dry-looking tongue touched blackish lips. He
swallowed hard. Then his eyes flew open again and he went on: "That's when Hayle
came up with his plan. Secret force to be dispatched to the Pole, loaded with modified
nuclear generator plant gear. There was a lot of resistance, but they bought it. He picked
me to go with him."
I narrowed my eyes at him. "Vice-Admiral Hayle was lost on a routine orbital
mission," I told him. "I never heard of any polar expedition."
"That's rightтАФthat was the cover story. Cosmic Top Secret. Operation Defrost, we
called it."
"Sounds as though you were on the inside."
He nodded, a weak twitch. All his strength was going into his story. "We sailed from
San Juan on Christmas Day. Two deep-water battlewagons, Maine and Pearl."
"They were lost with the submarine station at Guam."
"No. We had 'em. A dozen smaller ships, three thousand men. This was a major
effort. New York was already gone, Boston, Philly, most of the East Coast, San Diego,
CorpusтАФyou remember how it was. Blue water over Panama. Hell, we spotted bodies
floating a thousand miles at sea after the tornadoes. Surface covered with floating pumice
as far south as Tierra del Fuego; new volcanoes there that made a glow in the sky six
hundred miles east.
"Ice everywhere; a two-hundred-mile field of bergs broken loose from the cap.
Looked like a lot of ice, but it was just crumbs. I saw those blue ice cliffs, rising two
miles sheer out of the sea, peaks covered with black dust. That's a sight, mister. . . ." His
voice trailed off; his eyes wandered from me, staring into the pastтАФor into a pipedream.
"The man with the gun," I brought him back. "Where does he come in?"
"We made our landfall; lost our first men scaling the ice cliffs. Never even found the
bodies. Treacherous footing. Used the new model laser-type handguns to melt a path up,
then blasted. Took two weeks to get our gear ashore. Funny, wasn't too cold. Big yellow
sun shining down on the ice, balmy breeze blowing. Gorgeous sunsets, but not much dust
that far south. Ice looked fairly clean. We started inland in heavy assault and landing
craft. Made two hundred miles a day. Our target was a spot Hayle had picked in Queen
Maud LandтАФthe Pensacola Mountains, under the ice. The plan was to cut the glacier at
the ridge and free a couple of hundred square miles of it to move off toward the sea, with
a little help from us. We were to bore sinks to the rock, and pump hot air down. Theory
was we'd create a lubricating fluid layer at the interface.