"H. Beam Piper - Uller Uprising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

beaters, and to block escape routes." He turned back to Lieutenant Kendall and Sergeant Garcia.
"Good work, boys. And if the synchro-photos show that any of that first bunch got away, don't feel
too badly about it. These Jeels can hide on the top of a pool-table."

He climbed into the command-car, followed by Themistocles M'zangwe and Hideyoshi O'Leary. Sergeant
Harry Quong and Corporal Hassan Bogdanoff took their places on the front seat; the car lifted,
turned to nose into the wind, and rose in a slow spiral. Below, the fort grew smaller, a flat-
topped rectangle of masonry overlooking the pass, a gun covering each approach, and two more on
the square keep to cover the rocky hogback on which the fort had been built, with the flagpole
between them. Once that pole had lifted a banner of ragged black marsh-flopper skin bearing the
device of the Kragan river-chieftain whose family had built the castle; now it carried a neat
rectangle of blue bunting emblazoned with the wreathed globe of the Terran Federation and, below
that, the blue-gray pennant which bore the vermilion trademark of the Chartered Uller Company.

"Where now, sir?" Harry Quong asked. He looked at his watch. Seventeen-hundred; there wasn't time
for a visit to Zortolk's Old Fort, ten miles to the north at the next pass.

"Back to Konkrook, to the island." The nose of the car swung east by south; the cold-jet rotors
began humming and then the hot-jets were cut in. The car turned from the fort and the mountains
and shot away over the foothills toward the coastal plain. Below were forests, yellow-green with
new foliage of the second growing season of the equatorial year, veined with narrow dirt roads and
spotted with occasional clearings. Farther east, the dirty gray woodsmoke of Uller marked the
progress of the charcoal-burnings. It took forty years to burn the forests clear back to the flint
cliffs; by the time the burners reached the mountains, the new trees at the seaward edge would be
ready to cut. Off to the south, he could see the dark green squares, where the hemlocks and Norway
spruce had been planted by the Company. With a little chemical fertilizer, they were doing well,


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and they made better charcoal than the silicate-heavy native wood. That was the only natural fuel
on Uller; there was no coal, of course, since fallen timber and even standing dead trees petrified
in a matter of a couple of years. There was too much silica on Uller, and not enough of anything
else; what would be coal-seams on Terra were strata of silicified wood. And, of course, there was
no petroleum. There was less charcoal being burned now than formerly; the Uller Company had been
bringing in great quantities of synthetic thermoconcentrate-fuel, and had been setting up nuclear
furnaces and nuclear-electric power-plants, wherever they gained a foothold on the planet.

Beyond the forests came the farmlands. Around the older estates, thick walls of flint and
petrified wood had been built, and wide moats dug, to keep out the shellosaurs. But now the moats
were dry, and the walls falling into disrepair. Some of the newer farms, land devoted to
agriculture with the declining demand for charcoal, had neither moats nor walls. That was the
Company, too; the huge shell-armored beasts had become virtually extinct in the Konk Isthmus now,
since the introduction of bazookas and re-coilless rifles. There seemed to be quite a bit of power-
equipment working in the fields, and big contragravity lorries were drifting back and forth,
scattering fertilizer, mainly nitrates from Mimir or Yggdrasill. There were still a good number of
animal-drawn plows and harrows in use, however.

As planets went, Uller was no bargain, he thought sourly. At times, he wished he had never