"Resnick, Mike - Oracle 3 - Prophet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

"How about your parents or your employer?"
"Well, yeah, my boss has a little four-man job."
"Here?"
"Yes," said the young man. "It's in one of the hangars."
"Will they let you move it out to the landing field?"
"I suppose so."
Lomax peeled off five large-denomination notes. "It'll be sundown in about three hours. Do it then."
"Once they find out that I helped you, I'll be arrested."
Lomax shook his head. "You'll have plenty of time to fabricate an alibi. Almost every cop on the planet is going to be waiting for me at Jonathan Sturm's house."
"Sturm? What have you got against him?"
"Nothing," answered Lomax. "I never met the man."
"Then why -- ?"
"Just do what I said, okay?"
Neil stared at him. "I take it they've set a trap for you?" he asked at last.
Lomax nodded. "Will you help me?"
"I can't believe someone like you couldn't take them all out."
"Maybe I could," agreed Lomax. "But no one is paying me to do it, and when you put your life on the line often enough, you learn just how valuable a commodity it is. If I have to fight my way to my ship, I will -- but if there's an easier way, I'll take it." He paused. "I need to hide until sunset, and then I need you to move your ship." He stared at the young man. "Now, are you going to help me or not?"
"Yeah, I'll help you, Gravedancer."
"Good."
"On one condition," added Neil.
"Oh?"
"Take me with you. I've had it with this planet."
"I told you . . ."
Neil handed the money back to him. "That's my price."
Lomax grimaced.
"All right, it's a deal," he said at last.


3

Neil withdrew all his money from his bank, then parked in a secluded spot, where he and Lomax waited until nightfall.
Then they drove back to the spaceport, where Neil approached the hangar and had them bring his employer's ship out onto the reinforced pavement of the takeoff strip. While the ship's computer was waiting for takeoff clearance, the young man raced out of the cockpit and stopped the first security man he could find.
"Something's wrong!" he panted.
"What?" asked the man.
"Someone's hiding in the cargo compartment of my ship; the computer spotted the extra weight. I just got a glimpse of him. He's dressed all in black."
"You keep away from the ship," the security man instructed him. "We'll take it from here."
Lomax watched from the shadows until he was convinced all the security personnel had surrounded Neil's employer's ship. Then he walked, briskly and silently, to his own ship, where he found the young man waiting at the hatch.
"Nothing to it," grinned Neil as Lomax uttered the proper code words to open the hatch without detonating the security system within the ship.
"Let's go," said Lomax, entering the ship. "The second I activate the ignition, they're going to know they were duped. Grab a seat, strap yourself in, and keep your fingers crossed that no one is approaching on our exit path."
"No one ever comes here," said Neil, seating himself in the cramped cockpit. "That's why I want to get the hell out of here."
Lomax fed the coordinates of Olympus into the navigational computer, waited until it had chosen a flight path, then hit the ignition. As he had predicted, it brought all the armed security men back from the other ship, but he managed to take off before they could get off any damaging shots.
"So where are we going?" asked Neil Cayman when they had left the system and achieved light speeds.
"Olympus," answered Lomax.
The young man had the computer cast a cartographic hologram in the air above his seat. "I can't find it," he announced after a moment's scrutiny.
"Try Alpha Hayakawa IV," suggested Lomax.
"Right. Here it is. I wonder why the difference in names?"
"Standard," replied Lomax. "Most of the planets are named after the head of the Pioneer team that opened them up. Roman numerals indicate how far out from the sun it is; any other number tells you how many prior planets the man had opened."
"I don't follow you."
"This is Alpha Hayakawa IV," explained Lomax. "That means it was first charted by a man or woman named Hayakawa, and that it's the fourth planet from a binary sun. But if you look elsewhere, you might also find that it's Jones 39 or Jones 22, which means that it's the thirty-ninth or twenty-second planet opened up by some guy from the Pioneer Corps named Jones." He paused. "And of course, the first thing the settlers did was change the name. Probably it's got some mountain that looks like a holo of Mount Olympus back on Earth, or maybe the first governor was a Greek scholar, or maybe they had a civil war and the general on the winning side was named Olympus."
"It gets confusing, doesn't it?" said Neil. "All these names to learn."