"Judith Merril - Stormy Weather" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

meter-needles. Quickly, reflectively, she fed new data into the calcker, ignoring the chrono speaker's
increasingly urgent warnings till she could take time to switch it off. Then she hovered nervously over the
whirring machine, waiting for the fresh tape to emerge, watching the radar screen beyond it for some sign
of what the trouble might be.
Nothing there she didn't know about. Nothing but a little almost invisible interference fuzz in the far
corner. Like windo tracks, or. .. .
She pulled at the tape as it began rolling out, and started it through the microfilm magnifier almost
before there was enough length to let it ride the reel. Eagerly, she absorbed the steady stream of figures
and symbols until, abruptly, everything fitted together, and the pattern was clear.
Just a little interference fuzz in one cornerтАФa particloud! A mass of fragmentary rocks and pebbles,
the debris of some unidentified catastrophe in space: perhaps a minor everyday collision in the Belt;
perhaps some greater mishap farther out in the System; possibly, though unlikely, a grand smashup
between two extra-solar bodies light-years away.

IT DIDN ' T matter now where the cloud of grit and gravel came from; it mattered very much where it
was going. And it was headed straight in, irresistibly drawn by the gravitational pull of the giant
incinerator at the heart of the System. A tidy way to clean up solar trashтАФexcept that at its present
velocity, the drift- was due to cross the busiest space-lanes in the System, just outside Earth's orbit, and
perhapsтАФif it diffused at all under the pull of planetary gravityтАФbrush through the very edges of the
atmosphere.
Once more, Cathy checked the coordinates and velocity of the cloud, and then the Stations
Catalogue. No doubt about it: it was her baby. No other Station anywhere in range, and she was almost
directly in line between the oncoming drift and Control Central's satellite around Earth.
There was nothing very complex about the operation. Standard procedure was to release a fizz-jet
from the storage bay; position it inside the cloud and set it off; the whole job done at the remote control
board, using coordinates and timing set forth with near-impossible precision on the calcker tape.
If it were done just so, the tiny particles of matter that composed the cloud would be reduced to
powder fine enough to be pushed back, clear out of the System, by photon-power alone. And any
specks or pieces that remained big enough to continue to respond to the sun's gravity would be impelled
by the bomb burst to drift out sideways, perpendicularly away from the plane of the ecliptic; when they
came floating back eventually, they'd be far out of the traveled space-lanes.
The operator's job was not so much difficult as delicate: a matter of steering the fizzer to its optimum
placement, and then exploding it at the' split second laid down by the calcker's figuring. It took practiced
skill and close coordinationтАФbut Cathy had done it before, and as she got the data from the tape, found
nothing out of the ordinary in this story beyond the edge of excitement provided by its imminent closeness
to Earth.
She moved energetically now, logging data, setting up equations for the coordinates on the calcker,
checking the analog, the screen, the dials and meters that belted her little world. When the call came
through from Control Central twenty minutes after the first Alert, she registered it and replied without so
much as a moment's delusion that it was Mike calling instead.
"Cath? Just checking. We got a particloud pattern on our screen in your sector."
"Yeah, I noticed."
"Everything under control?"
"I'm calcking the bomb-set now."
"How's it look from out there?"
What's the matter with them? Cathy wondered irritably, but kept her reactions out of her reply, or
hoped she did. "S.O.P.," she answered tersely.
"Right. Check in when you get your set?"
"Better not. I'm eclipsed." She glanced at the ceiling. "Oxy's under 85 now, and a long way to go."
"Sorry."