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

would seem to tilt a little. If unshielded human eyes could have endured the rays of Nu Pupis, Ni-
flheim's primary, the whole scene would have appeared a vivid Saint Patrick's Day green, the
effect of the blue-predominant light on the yellow atmosphere. The outside 'visor-pickup, however,
was fitted with filters which blocked out the gamma-rays and X-rays and most of the ultraviolet-
rays, and added the longer light-waves of red and orange which were absent, so that things looked
much as they would have under the light of a GO-type star like Sol. The air was faintly yellow,
the sky was yellow with a greenish cast, and the clouds were green-gray.

A thousand feet below, the local equivalent of a forest grew, the trees, topped with huge ragged
leaves, looking like hundred-foot stalks of celery. There would be animal life down there, too-
little round things, four inches across, like eight-legged crabs, gnawing at the vegetation, and
bigger things, two feet long, with articulated shell-armor and sixteen legs, which fed on the
smaller herbivores. Beyond, in the mid-dleground, was open grassland, if one could so call a mat
of wormlike colorless or pastel-tinted sprouts, and a river meandered through it. On the skyline,
fifty iles away, was a range of low dunes and hills, none 'more than a thousand feet high.

No human had ever set foot on the surface, or breathed the air, of Niflheim. To have done so would
have been instant death; the air was a mixture of free fluorine and fluoride gasses, the soil was
metallic fluorides, damp with acid rains, and the river was pure hydrofluoric acid. Even the
ordinary spacesuit would have been no protection; the glass and rubber and plastic would have
disintegrated in a matter of minutes. People came to Niflheim, and worked the mines and uranium
refineries and chemical plants, but they did so inside power-driven and contragravity-lifted
armor, and they lived on artificial satellites two thousand miles off-planet. This vehicle, for
instance, was built and protected as no spaceship ever had to be, completely insulated and entered
only through a triple airlock-an outer lock, which would be evacuated outward after it was closed,
a middle lock kept evacuated at all times, and an inner lock, evacuated into the interior of the
vehicle before the middle lock could be opened. Niflheim was worse than airless, much worse.

The chief engineer sat at his controls, making the minor lateral adjustments in the vehicle's
position which were not possible to the automatic controls. One of the radiomen was receiving from
the orbital base; the other was saying, over and over, in an exasperatedly patient voice: "Dr.
Murillo. Dr. Murillo. Please come in, Dr. Murillo." At his own panel of instruments, a small man
with grizzled black hair around a bald crown, and a grizzled beard, chewed nervously at the stump
of a dead cigar and listened intently to what was-or for what wasn't-coming in to his headset
receiver. A couple of assistants checked dials and refreshed their memories from notebooks and
peered anxiously into the big screen. A large, plump-faced, young man in soiled khaki shirt and
shorts, with extremely hairy legs, was doodling on his notepad and eating candy out of a bag. And
a black-haired girl in a suit of coveralls three sizes too big for her, and, apparently, not much
of anything else, lounged with one knee hooked over her chair-arm, staring into the screen at the
distant horizon.

"Dr. Murillo. Dr. Mur-" The radioman broke off in mid-syllable and listened for a moment. "I hear
you, doctor, go ahead." Then, a moment later "What's your position, now, doctor?"

"I can see them," the girl said, lifting a hand in front of her. "At two o'clock, about one of my
hand's-breadths above the horizon."

The man with the grizzled beard put his face into the fur around the eyepiece of the telescopic-
'visor and twisted a dial. "You have good eyes, Miss Quin-ton," he complimented. "Only four
personal armors; Ahmed, ask him where the fifth is."