"Jerry Pournelle - High Justice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pournelle Jerry)

Courtney brought him the coffee and sat opposite to face him. Nice kid, he thought. Too nice for
casual affairs. Besides, she reminded him of his daughter and was the best assistant he'd ever had
on the technical stuff, didn't pay enough attention to important matters like finance, but she was
learning. Give her a couple of years, she'd be ready to take on a job as an independent
troubleshooter for Nuclear General. Then, when she wasn't working directly for him, maybe . . .
only then he'd probably never see her.
"Looks like they're coming along nicely," she said. "Of course, we saw it all from the satellite
pictures, but . . ."
"Yah. The real thing's always a little realer, if you know what I mean. Tell me what I'm seeing."
"Yes, sir." She shook her head slightly, rippling long blonde curls. Bill Adams was undoubtedly
the most brilliant man she'd ever met, but he acted as if he didn't know much. Sometimes he
didn't, either. You could never tell when he was fishing for information and when he had made a
thorough study. . . . "The big square color patches are the solar salt works. Brines from the
desalinization plants go in one of them, sea water in the others. It took a lot of plastic film to
line the bottoms . . . the large buildings along one row of solar ponds are purification plants.
Potassium, magnesium, phosphorus, Portland cement, the things we can get from sea water. I. G.
Farbenwerke runs that part of the Station."
"Hmm." Adams sipped his coffee. "Heard from von Alten yet?"
"Yes, sir. He's already at the Station. So are most of the others."
"Good. Give 'em time to look things over. OK, what's the rest of this gubbage?"
Courtney eyed him carefully. Just how much was he putting her on? As far as she knew he had never


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been a professor, he hardly had time for it since he wasn't yet forty, but sometimes he reminded
her of one, asking questions to see if his staff had done their homework . . . but then he really
might not know. He mostly studied financial reports; his favorite saying was "Leave engineering to
the engineers."
"The things that look like railroad roundhouses are our reactors and sea-water flash evaporators,
the round ponds next to them are treatment pools where they precipitate out solids with the KOH-
HCL process."
"What's that big complex near the runway?" Adams asked.
She nodded. "That's the Allis-Chalmers electrolysis cells. Ammonia synthesis next to it. And just
beyond that, the pink concrete building, is the GE experimental steam-hydrogen process fertilizer
plant. It's supposed to be a lot more efficient than Allis-Chalmers, but there're bugs."
The plane circled low over the desert as the pilots got landing instructions. Adams pointed as
they banked steeply. "I see the railroad's working." With the electric ore train to bring the
scale into focus he examined the rest of the Station. He knew from the reports that the industrial
complex stretched along nearly four kilometers of seacoast and three inland, and beyond the
industrial buildings were three-hundred-thousand acres of land either under cultivation or being
made ready for it. The irrigation grid was plainly visible, and bright red tractors moved between
the pipelines. There were another fifty-thousand acres of solar salt lakes and bitterns ponds. . .
. Otjiwar was bigt but for a billion dollars it ought to be big. "What's the crop now?" he asked,
pointing to the tractors.
She took a sheaf of papers from her briefcase. "The crop phasing's pretty delicate," she told him.
"Right now they're in the high export value pattern. Harvesting dry beans and cotton, planting
winter wheat and potatoes behind the harvesters. This pattern uses the least water, but the
government wants them to switch to a high-calorie system for exports to Rondidi."