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

transferred to automated ground vehicles and spent two years in a grueling training
school when it became obvious the United States didn't need any more jet pilots on
the Moon. Every year he spends on the Moon is one more year he doesn't have to
spend on Earth. If he can win another tour of duty on the Moon, he may even be
able to stay on the Moon until he retires.
There is also a womanтАФa doctor who has a permanent berth on the Moon
because she is a leading expert on lunar physiology. She won't go back to Earth with
him if he has to go and Major Davino doesn't blame her.


Three days after he leaves his home base, Major Davino is still creeping across
the surface of the Moon. Four fully armed robot vehicles are spread out around his
command vehicle in a large semicircle. Four screens are lit up on his control panel.
Each robot vehicles has to be maneuvered through the foothills as carefully as he is
maneuvering the command vehicle.
The foothills are a jumbled mass of rocks, craters, and low hills. The terrain can
hide him from the E.E.C. radar if he is careful, but the Europs will know he is
coming as soon as he lets them pick up one blip on the screen mounted on the slope
of Mount Ampere. Anything that moves stands out on the lunar landscape like a ship
on an empty ocean. Robot scouts will start forming a circle around the place where
the radar picked up the blip. The nearest European combat team will start moving
into position. Electronic detectors will start hunting for tracks that contain recent
traces of exhaust fumes and vented CO 2.
The robot vehicle on his left passes behind a rock. The screens blank. The
muscles in his back and legs tense.
The vehicle on his left is Gun Buggy Three. It is about five hundred meters away
and it is the only gun buggy he can see. All the signals traveling between him and his
squadron have to be relayed through Three. His vehicles are all traveling on
automatic until Three creeps past the rock and resumes contact.
A well-placed enemy observer would know he is now out of contact with his
squadron. He has fought six hundred missions in the computer simulator and he has
usually picked, a moment like this when he has been the ambusher. His emotions
responded with a rush of pleasure every time he hit the main link in his opponent's
commo chain during a temporary blackout. His simulated gun buggies swept in
before his opponent could re-establish the chain and the simulated enemy squadron
was destroyed in five minutes.
He is not afraid he will die. No one has ever died in a battle on the Moon. The
struggle on the Moon is a limited, courtly warfare in which men withdraw or
surrender when they are outmaneuvered. Someone may die by accident sooner or
later, but death is not his major worry.
The screens clear. He taps the halt button and the screens freeze while he studies
the landscape. Four will have to move thirty meters to the right and peer around that
medium-size crater on his left. Three will have to drop back twenty meters and hold
position so it can maintain the commo chain. Two and O n e
He taps out his orders on the computer keyboard mounted on the left side of his
control panel. The computers on the gun buggies verify the orders with the computer
in the command vehicle and five green lights flash on the control panel. He presses
the start button and the whole squadron creeps forward.
He has been moving through the foothills like this for two Earth days. The whole
squadron stops every hundred meters and he plans the next move for all five