"H. Beam Piper - The Answer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

"Yes, I'm here. What time is it?" he asked, and then added, "I fell asleep. I was dreaming."

It was all right; he was going to be able to remember. He could still see the slim woman with the graying
blonde hair, playing with the little dachshund among the new-fallen leaves on the lawn. He was glad
they'd both been in this dream together; these dream-glimpses were all he'd had for the last fifteen years,
and they were too precious to lose. He opened his eyes. The Russian was sitting just outside the light
from the open door of the bungalow, lighting a cigarette. For a moment, he could see the blocky,
high-cheeked face, now pouched and wrinkled, and then the flame went out and there was only the red
coal glowing in the darkness. He closed his eyes again, and the dream picture came back to him, the
woman catching the little dog and raising her head as though to speak to him.

"Plenty of time, yet." Pitov was speaking German instead of Spanish, as they always did between
themselves. "They're still counting down from minus three hours. I just phoned the launching site for a
jeep. Eugenio's been there ever since dinner; they say he's running around like a cat looking for a place to
have her first litter of kittens."

He chuckled. This would be something new for Eugenio GalvezтАФfor which he could be thankful.

"I hope the generators don't develop any last-second bugs," he said. "We'll only be a mile and a half
away, and that'll be too close to fifty kilos[Pg 6] of negamatter if the field collapses."

"It'll be all right," Pitov assured him. "The bugs have all been chased out years ago."

"Not out of those generators in the rocket. They're new." He fumbled in his coat pocket for his pipe and
tobacco. "I never thought I'd run another nuclear-bomb test, as long as I lived."

"Lee!" Pitov was shocked. "You mustn't call it that. It isn't that, at all. It's purely a scientific experiment."

"Wasn't that all any of them were? We made lots of experiments like this, back before 1969." The
memories of all those other tests, each ending in an Everest-high mushroom column, rose in his mind.
And the end resultтАФthe United States and the Soviet Union blasted to rubble, a whole hemisphere
pushed back into the Dark Ages, a quarter of a billion dead. Including a slim woman with graying blonde
hair, and a little red dog, and a girl from Odessa whom Alexis Pitov had been going to marry. "Forgive
me, Alexis. I just couldn't help remembering. I suppose it's this shot we're going to make, tonight. It's so
much like the other ones, beforeтАФ" He hesitated slightly. "Before the Auburn Bomb."

There; he'd come out and said it. In all the years they'd worked together at the Instituto Argentino de
Ciencia Fisica, that had been unmentioned between them. The families of hanged cutthroats avoid
mention of ropes and knives. He thumbed the old-fashioned American lighter and held it to his pipe.
Across the veranda, in the darkness, he knew that Pitov was looking intently at him.

"You've been thinking about that, lately, haven't you?" the Russian asked, and then, timidly: "Was that
what you were dreaming of?"

"Oh, no, thank heaven!"

"I think about it, too, always. I supposeтАФ" He seemed relieved, now that it had been brought out into the
open and could be discussed. "You saw it fall, didn't you?"

"That's right. From about thirty miles away. A little closer than we'll be to this shot, tonight. I was in