"Pohl, Frederik - The Sweet, Sad Queen Of The Grazing Isles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

Commodore's hired assassin, but the assassin never came. All that came was a
note, one day, mailed from Papua New Guinea via the boat's air service, and all
it said was, "It's not your fault, this time.
The Commodore never broke a promise to me but two. The first was that he'd have
me killed if I failed to protect May's interest. I did fail her then, and knew I
had, but I didn't die. The other promise was that I would never have to worry
again, because after he died, for twenty years and more. I did nothing else.
Later on, in Twenty-three, The queen she married, but not to me. Later still, in
Twenty-four, A scowling imp of a son she bore. She bore him and raised him for
years and miles, The son of the queen of the grazing isles.
When May was fifteen, Van Dorn went at last back to the engines, and May went
off to school. She took her four friends with her, the four other Mays with whom
she'd grown up, but Ben would not allow me to join them. "You can keep your job
and your pay, Jason, he said to me, "but leave my sister May alone, for when
she's ready to fall in love it will be with a rich boy and a sensible boy and a
handsome boy, and not with a dirty old man who sleeps with her socks under his
pillow. That was a lie. I told him it was a lie. But what was behind it was no
lie, for the love was still there. If May had been five years older, if she had
been a year older even, I might easily have told her what I felt before I let
her go. And might have got a good answer, perhaps. There was thirty years
between us, and I am not handsome. But she was easy with me, and trusted me, and
had good reason for trust.
So Ben the Bastard fouled Owner's Quarters with his fat dark wife and their
sallow brat, Betsy, who never liked me. Nor I her, to be sure. That whole family
was repellent. I never knew Ben's mother, but I knew who she was. A file clerk
in a lawyer's office. The Commodore seduced her to get a look into the lawyer's
contract files, where there was something worth money for him to see. He got his
look. She got his child. He would never marry her, of course, for she hadn't a
dime, and when she pupped his bastard, he was long gone away. I will say for the
Commodore that he acknowledged the son. He paid the bills to bring him up, even
when it was hard for him. He sent the boy through school and gave him a place
with the Fleet, though not at sea, but would never give him his name.
So it was Benjamin (which means "gift of God ) Zoll (for that was the woman's
name) who came aboard with the will in his pocket and the resolve in his heart
to reign.
Well, he had more than arrogance. He was a mean- hearted man, but a hardworking
one. The first day he was over the side in a diving mask, discovering cracks in
the antifouling plates and surfacing in a fury. Twenty maintenance workers lost
their jobs that day, but the next crew kept the plates repaired, and we saved a
thousand dollars worth of steaming fuel a week.
An ocean-thermal generating boat lives off the temperature difference between
deep water and sun-warmed surface water. The top water warms the working fluid-
a halocarbon with a low boiling point-and it becomes steam and goes through the
low-pressure turbines to make electricity; the electricity splits water into
hydrogen and fixes nitrogen from the air, and we sell what it makes. The
difficulty is the halocarbon working fluid. It is too expensive to vent to the
air. It must be condensed and recycled, and for that we need something cold. The
sea gives us that. There is plenty of cold water in every deep sea, but it is
half a kilometer down or more, and so we must pump it to the surface. Pumping
and pumping. Pumping cold water up from the deep. Pumping the working fluid