"Mike Resnick - Birthright" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

unbelievably huge standing army. Another four hundred planets were used for scientific research and
mining, which required twenty more agricultural worlds to supply them with food and water. Another
three hundred and fifty were just being settled, and required massive efforts on the part of their
populations to replace jungles, swamps, deserts, mountains, and oceans with human cities.

But fourteen hundred worlds represented only the most insignificant portion of the galaxy. Man hungered
for more, and so he remained fruitful and multiplied. He sought out still more worlds, explored them,
populated them, tamed them.

This was where the Pioneer Corps came in. Unlike the pioneers of old, the dispossessed and
downtrodden who sought the freedom that new land would bring them, the Pioneer Corps was
composed of experts in the field of terraformingтАФopening up planets and making them livable. Highly
skilled and meticulously trained, the men and women of the Pioneers were civilian adjuncts of the
Republic's Navy. Their relationship to the Republic was somewhat akin to government contractors, in
that they were not officially under the direct command of the government, but were free agents whose
membership in the Corps enabled them to receive lucrative contracts from the Republic.

Frequently their jobs consisted of nothing more than adapting alien dwellings to human needs.
Sometimes they were required to kill off a hostile alien population, and occasionally they were forced to
exterminate nonhostile populations as well. Among their ranks were engineers who, with the aid of the
Republic's technology, could turn streams into rivers and lakes into oceans, who could thoroughly
defoliate a planet twice the size of Jupiter, who could change the ecology of an arid world and turn it into
a planetary oasis.

The Pioneer Corps numbered some 28,000 members, but the Republic, still suffering growing pains and
testing its sleeping muscles, dreamed in terms not of hundreds but millions of worlds, and thus the Corps
was spread very thin. And as the Republic's needs became more specialized, so did the tasks of the
Pioneers.

One such need was for energy. All the worlds of the Republic had long since converted to total atomic
technologies, and there could be no turning back. But the supplies of radium, plutonium, uranium, and
their isotopes, even on newly discovered worlds, barely met their needs. Solar power conversion plants
were erected by the tens of millions, but Man had not yet found an economical method of conserving that
power. And, since almost half of the Republic's commerce depended on interstellar travel, new energy
sources headed man's list of priorities.

Then Zeta Cancri IV was discovered. A tiny but massive world, its very high rotational speed combined
with the exotic elemental makeup of its core to form enormous magnetic fields of fantastic energy. Ions
injected into these fields were accelerated to speeds manyfold higher than those found in Man's most
powerful cyclotrons. The interaction of the planet's electrical and magnetic fields, plus the formation of
different ions from the vaporization of the surface elements, created almost ideal conditions for nuclear
transformations.

In other words, random sections of Zeta Cancri IV's surface tended to go Bang with absolutely no
warning.

The brilliant visual displays Bowman and Nelson saw from their ship were merely the end result of fission
reactions on the planet's surface. The lower-atomic-number atoms were built up to higher nonstable
molecules by these nuclear transformationsтАФand then all hell broke loose. What were highly specialized
laboratory conditions on Earth were simple natural phenomena on Zeta Cancri IV. A continuous series of