"Piper, H Beam - Fuzzy 1 - little Fuzzy1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

H Beam Piper - Fuzzy 1 - Little Fuzzy

Little Fuzzy
Copyright @ 1962 By H. Beam Piper


To Kenneth S. White who helped Little Fuzzy find home in print

1

JACK HOLLOWAY found himself squinting, the orange sun full in
his eyes. He raised a hand to push his hat forward, then lowered it
to the controls to alter the pulse rate of the contragravity-field
generators and lift the manipulator another hundred feet. For a
moment he sat, puffing on the short pipe that had yellowed the
corners of his white mustache, and looked down at the red rag tied
to a bush against the rock face of the gorge five hundred yards
away. He was smiling in anticipation.

"This'll be a good one," he told himself aloud, in the manner of
men who have long been their own and only company. 'I want to
see this one go up."

He always did. He could remember at least a thousand blast-shots
he had fired back along the years and on more planets than he
could name at the moment, including a few thermonuclears, but
they were all different and they were always something to watch,
even a little one like this. Flipping the switch, his thumb found the
discharger button and sent out a radio impulse; the red rag
vanished in an upsurge of smoke and dust that mounted out of the
gorge and turned to copper when the sunlight touched it. The big
manipulator, weightless on contragravity, rocked gently; falling
debris pelted the trees and splashed in the little stream.

He waited till the machine stabilized, then glided it down to where
he had ripped a gash in the cliff with the charge of cataclysmite.
Good shot: brought down a lot of sandstone, cracked the vein of
flint and hadn't thrown it around too much. A lot of big slabs were
loose. Extending the forward claw-arms, he pulled and tugged, and
then used the underside grapples to pick up a chunk and drop it on
the flat ground between the cliff and the stream. He dropped
another chunk on it, breaking both of them, and then another and
another, until he had all he could work over for the rest of the day.
Then he set down, got the toolbox and the long-handled
contragravity lifter, and climbed to the ground where he opened the
box, put on gloves and an eyescreen and got out a microray
scanner and a vibrohammer.