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

A jeep came around the corner, lighting the dark roadway between the bungalows, its radio on and
counting downтАФTwenty two minutes. Twenty one fifty nine, fifty eight, fifty sevenтАФIt came to a
stop in front of their bungalow, at exactly Minus Two Hours, Twenty One Minutes, Fifty Four Seconds.
The driver called out in Spanish:

"Doctor Richardson; Doctor Pitov! Are you ready?"

"Yes, ready. We're coming."

They both got to their feet, Richardson pulling himself up reluctantly. The older you get, the harder it is to
leave a comfortable chair. He settled himself beside his colleague and former enemy, and the jeep started
again, rolling between the buildings of the living-quarters area and out onto the long, straight road across
the pampas toward the distant blaze of electric lights.

He wondered why he had been thinking so much, lately, about the Auburn Bomb. He'd questioned, at
times, indignantly, of course, whether Russia had launched itтАФbut it wasn't until tonight, until he had
heard what Pitov had had to say, that he seriously doubted it. Pitov wouldn't lie about it, and Pitov would
have been in a position to have known the truth, if the missile had been launched from Russia. Then he
stopped thinking about what was waterтАФor bloodтАФa long time over the dam.

The special policeman at the entrance to the launching site reminded them that they were both smoking;
when they extinguished, respectively, their cigarette and pipe, he waved the jeep on and went back to his
argument with a carload of tourists who wanted to get a good view of the launching.

"There, now, Lee; do you need [Pg 8] anything else to convince you that this isn't a weapon project?"
Pitov asked.

"No, now that you mention it. I don't. You know, I don't believe I've had to show an identity card the
whole time I've been here."
"I don't believe I have an identity card," Pitov said. "Think of that."

The lights blazed everywhere around them, but mostly about the rocket that towered above everything
else, so thick that it seemed squat. The gantry-cranes had been hauled away, now, and it stood alone,
but it was still wreathed in thick electric cables. They were pouring enough current into that thing to light
half the street-lights in Buenos Aires; when the cables were blown free by separation charges at the
blastoff, the generators powered by the rocket-engines had better be able to take over, because if the
magnetic field collapsed and that fifty-kilo chunk of negative-proton matter came in contact with natural
positive-proton matter, an old-fashioned H-bomb would be a firecracker to what would happen. Just
one hundred kilos of pure, two-hundred proof MC2.

The driver took them around the rocket, dodging assorted trucks and mobile machinery that were being
hurried out of the way. The countdown was just beyond two hours five minutes. The jeep stopped at the
edge of a crowd around three more trucks, and Doctor Eugenio Galvez, the director of the Institute, left
the crowd and approached at an awkward half-run as they got down.

"Is everything checked, gentlemen?" he wanted to know.

"It was this afternoon at 1730," Pitov told him. "And nobody's been burning my telephone to report
anything different. Are the balloons and the drone planes ready?"