"Tom Purdom - Moon Rocks" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

ANALOG APRIL 1973

MOON ROCKS
Tom Purdom

If hell can be defined as the loss of everything you've hoped for,
then even the courtliest, most civilized kind of war is hell!


The rocks have been lying on the Moon for two and a half billion years.
Twenty-five million centuries before Joseph Davino was born, a small asteroid
scraped the lower slopes of the lunar Apennines and smashed into the southern edge
of Mare Imbrium. Rocks and boulders flew across the surface of the Moon and sat
there in perfect, undisturbed silence until a machine rolled across the dusty
landscape and flashed a message at its controllers on Earth. Rocks of high-grade
gold ore are lying on the surface of Mare Imbrium near the border of the region
dominated by the European Economic Community. There are no tracks within five
kilometers of the site. No one in the E.E.C. knows the ore is there.
"You'll be inside their radar range a hundred kilometers before you reach the site,"
Colonel LeFarge says. "You'll have to pick your way through the foothills until
you're almost on top of it. You'll have a double supply of consumables and I'll have
Wild Bill take a supply caravan out and pick you up at Base Six. I thought about
sending out a diversion but I decided you'd have a better chance if we set things up
so you could take your time in the foothills."
Major Joseph Davino is a pleasant, cosmopolitan man who still feels warm and
nostalgic when he thinks about the books about space travel he read when he was a
childтАФbooks in which it was generally agreed that no one would ever fight wars
over gold mines on other planets. His three-year tour of duty will be up in four
months and he already knows Washington is planning to follow the normal program
and replace him with a new volunteer. His work on the Moon has been competent
but undistinguished and he has one black mark on his record: he let an enemy
combat team slip past a perimeter he was guarding and they managed to pick up six
hundred pounds of unrefined gold ore and cripple a million dollars worth of
high-grade equipment. Colonel LeFarge is handing him a difficult, nerve-wracking
job but they both know the colonel is giving him a break, too. The automated
exploration vehicle has stumbled on a strike that looks like it may be one of the
biggest finds in the history of lunar exploration. If he can sneak into the E.E.C.'s turf
and snatch it away from them under their noses, the computer jockeys in the
Pentagon will probably listen to the colonel's recommendation and give him the only
reward he wantsтАФthree more years in which he will be two hundred and forty
thousand miles away from dirty skies, dirty wars, short rations, and all the violence,
frustration, and despair that seethe across the beautiful globe hanging above the lunar
landscape.
Major Joseph Davino executed his mission with superlative skill and an
outstanding exhibition of the qualities that make an officer suitable for combat on
the lunar surface. His intelligence and his careful attention to detail demonstrate
that he is the kind of tested officer we need in our forces on the Moon. It is
recommended that his request for a second tour of duty be approvedтАж
Major Davino hates planes, guns, and all the nit-picking restrictions of military life.
He spent ten years in the Air Force after he graduated from college, however, and he