"Vonda N. McIntyre-Screwtop" - читать интересную книгу автора (McIntyre Vonda N)

Screwtop
by Vonda N. McIntyre
This story copyright 1979 by Vonda N. McIntyre. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal use.
All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


Hot and wet from the fine, steamy rain, Kylis sat on her heels at the top of the drilling pit and waited
for the second-duty shift to end. She rubbed at a streak of the thick red mud that had spattered her legs
and her white boots when she walked across the compound. Redsun's huge dim star altered colors;
white became a sort of pinkish gray. But among the forest's black foliage and against the Pit's clay, white
uniforms stood out and made prisoners easier for the guards to see.
A few other people waited with Kylis at the south end of the deep slash in the earth. Like them, she
crouched unsheltered from the rain, strands of wet hair plastered to her cheeks, watching for friends she
had not seen in forty days.
Below lay two completed generator domes; above them rose the immense delicate cooling towers,
and the antenna beaming power along the relay system to North Continent. Fences and guards protected
the finished installations from the prisoners. Kylis and the rest worked only on clearing the fern forest,
extending the Pit, drilling a third steam well-- the dirty, dangerous jobs.
Paralleling the distant wall of volcanoes in the east, the drill pit extended northward. Its far end was
invisible, obscured by the rain and by clouds of acrid smoke that billowed from the trash piles. The Pit
was being lengthened again to follow the fault line where drilling was most efficient. Another strip of frond
forest had been destroyed, and its huge primitive ferns now lay in blackened heaps. The stalks never
burned completely, but until the coals died a bank of irritating smoke and sticky ash would hang over the
prison camp. The fine rain sizzled into steam when it fell on glowing embers.
Kylis started at the long shrill siren that ended the second shift. For an instant she was afraid the
hallucinations had returned, but the normal sounds of the prison responded to the signal. The faraway
roar of bulldozers ceased; the high whine of the drill slipped down in pitch and finally stopped. People left
their machines, threw down their tools, and straggled toward the trail. They passed beneath the guards'
towers, watched and counted by the Lizard's crew. One by one and in occasional pairs they started up
the steep slope of clay and debris and volcanic ash, picking their way around gullies and across muddy
rivulets. Screwtop seemed very quiet now, almost peaceful, with no noise but the hum of turbines in the
two geothermal power plants, and the rhythmic clatter of the pumps that kept the drill pit unflooded.
Kylis could not yet see Jason. She frowned. He and Gryf, who was on the third shift, had both been
all right when she got off duty. She was sure of that, for news of accidents traveled instantaneously
between working crews. But Kylis had been alone, sleeping much of the time, in the nine hours since the
end of her shift. Anything could happen in nine hours. She tried to reassure herself about her friends'
safety, because the pattern and rhythm of the work just ended had been too normal to follow a really bad
accident.
She could not put aside her anxiety, and knew she would not until she had seen and spoken to and
touched both Gryf and Jason. She still found herself surprised that she could care so much about two
other human beings. Her past life had depended on complete independence and self-sufficiency.
Below, Gryf would be standing in the group of prisoners near the drilling rig. She tried to make him
out, but the only person she could distinguish at this distance was the guard captain, called by everyone--
when he was out of earshot-- the Lizard, for his clean-shaven face and head gave him a smoothly
impervious reptilian appearance. He was standing alone, facing the prisoners, giving orders. He wore
black, as if in defiance of the heat, as a symbol of his superiority over everyone else in the camp. Even