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

"We only see four of your personal-armors," the radioman said. "Who's missing, and why?" He waited
for a moment, then lowered the hand-phone and turned. "The fifth one's inside the handling-
machine. One of the Ullerans. Gorkrink."



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The larger of the specks that had appeared on the horizon resolved itself into a handling-machine,
a thing like an oversized contragravity-tank, with a bulldozer-blade, a stubby derrick-boom
instead of a gun, and jointed, claw-tipped arms to the sides. The smaller dots grew into personal
armor-egg-shaped things that sprouted arms and grab-hooks and pushers in all directions. The man
with the grizzled beard began talking rapidly into his hand-phone, then hung it up. There was a
series of bumps, and the armor-tender, weightless on contragravity, shook as the handling-machine
came aboard.

"You ever see any nuclear bombing, Miss Quin-ton?" the young man with the hairy legs asked,
offering her his candy bag.

"Only by telecast, back Sol-side," she replied, helping herself. 'Test-shots at the Federation
Navy proving-ground on Mars. I never even heard of nuclear bombs being used for mining till I came
here, though."

"Well, if this turns out as well as the other job, three months ago, it'll be something to see,"
he promised. "These volcanoes have been dormant for, oh, maybe as long as a thousand years; there
ought to be a pretty good head of gas down there. And the mag-ma'll be thick, viscous stuff, like
basalt on Terra. Of course, this won't be anything like basalt in composition-it'll be intensely
compressed metallic fluorides, with a very high metal-content. The volcanoes we shot three months
ago yielded a fine flow of lava with all sorts of metals-nickel, beryllium, vanadium, chromium,
iridium, as well as copper and iron."

"What sort of gas were you speaking about?" she asked.

"Hydrogen. That's what's going to make the fireworks; it combines explosively with fluorine. The
hydrogen-fluorine combination is what passes for combustion here; the result is hydrofluoric acid,
the local equivalent of water. See, the metallic core of this planet is covered, much less thickly
than that of Terra, with fluoride rock-fluorspar, and that sort of thing. There's nothing like
granite here, for instance. That's why those big dunes, out there, are the best Niflheim has in
the way of mountains. The subsurface hydrogen is produced when the acid filters down through the
rock, combines with pure metals underneath."

"Dr. Murillo's inside, now," the radioman said. "Just came out of the inner airlock. He'll be up
as soon as he gets out of his pressure-suit."

"As soon as he gets here, I'll touch it off," the bearded man said. "Everything set, de Jong?"

"Everything ready, Dr. Gomes," one of his assistants assured him.