"George R. R. Martin - With Morning Comes Mistfall (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

them alone?"
I left him alone then. Alone with his drinks.

The next few weeks were hectic ones, for the expedition and for me.
Dubowski went about things thoroughly, you had to give him that. He had
planned' his assault on Wraithworld with meticulous precision.
Mapping came first. Thanks to the mists, what maps: there were of
Wraithworld were very crude by modern standards. So Dubowski sent out a whole
fleet of roboprobes, to skim above the mists and steal their secrets with
sophisticated sensory devices. From the in
formation that came pouring in, a detailed topography of the region was pieced
together.
That done, Dubowski and his assistants then used the maps to carefully
plot every recorded wraith sighting since the Gregor Expedition. Considerable
data on the sightings had been compiled and analyzed long before we left
Earth, of course. Heavy use of the matchless collection on wraiths in the
Castle Cloud library filled in the gaps that remained. As expected, sightings
were most common in the valleys around the hotel, the only permanent human
habitation on the planet.
When the plotting was completed, Dubowski set out his wraith traps,
scattering most of them in the areas where wraiths had been reported most
frequently. He also put a few in distant, outlying regions, however, including
the seacoast plain where Gregor's ship had made the initial contact.
The traps weren't really traps, of course. They were squat duralloy
pillars, packed with most every type of sensing and recording equipment known
to Earth science. To the traps, the mists were all but nonexistent. If some
unfortunate wraith wandered into survey range, there would be no way it could
avoid detection.
Meanwhile, the mapping roboprobes were pulled in to be overhauled and
reprogrammed, and then sent out again. With the topography known in detail,
the probes could be sent through the mists on low-level patrols without fear
of banging into a concealed mountain. The sensing equipment carried by the
probes was not the equal of that in the wraith traps, of course. But the
probes had a much greater range, and could cover thousands of square miles
each day.
Finally, when the wraith traps were deployed and the roboprobes were in
the air, Dubowski and his men took to the mist forests themselves. Each
carried a heavy backpack of sensors and detection devices. The
human search teams had more mobility than the wraith

traps, and more sophisticated equipment than the probes. They hovered a
different area each day, in ' painstaking detail.
I went along on a few of those trips, with a backpack of my own. It made
for some interesting copy, even though we never found anything. And while on
search, I fell in love with the mist forests.
The tourist literature likes to call them "the ghastly mist forests of
haunted Wraithworld." But they're not ghastly. Not really. There's a strange
sort of beauty ,` there, for those who can appreciate it.
The trees are thin and very tall, with white bark and pale gray leaves.
But the forests are not without color. There's a parasite, a hanging moss of