"Bruce Holland Rogers - Big Far Now" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

Big Far Now
by Bruce Holland Rogers
This story copyright 1991 by Bruce Holland Rogers. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal
use. All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


Veloz was a quirky world, and its strangeness should have put all of us on edge, made us think in
different ways. There was so much about the place that we hadn't been able to explain. For instance, the
planet's sun was an F5 star, nearly double the mass of Sol and more than five times as bright. The planet
spun in a fast, tight orbit, and because of the planet's proximity to its sun and the sun's luminosity, the
surface radiation should have been sizzling.
It was Earth-like.
We didn't know why. We had theories about atmospheric screening, but none of our speculations ever
matched our data.
There was more. The planet was small, but incredibly dense. The surface gravity was close to that on
Earth, and the planet had retained a moist, nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere. It supported abundant life,
though not quite what colonists had encountered on other living planets. The planet's life was distributed
uniformly over its surface, where the temperature was also virtually uniform, even at the poles, and rain
fell predictably every morning from skies that were never completely clear. There was one type of
ecological community. One. Land on any part of Veloz, and you'd see the same dense forest and frenetic
animals you'd see anywhere else on the planet. Always, the same huge towertrees and domewood.
Always, the same fast, small predators and prey that looked vaguely like mammals. Lightning dogs and
Shies.
There was more about the place that was strange, that should have set us to thinking: the canisters I
had discovered, for instance, or Joanna's observations about how different some populations of Shies
were from others. And then there was the composition of one particular mountain. It was all odd enough
that we should have slowed down there, on that planet named for speed, and thought things out more
deliberately.
I say we, but I really mean I.
Joanna says I shouldn't blame myself for what happened, even though she recently called me a
coward. She says there was a kind of momentum that got started with the way the expedition was
funded, and that I couldn't have made a real difference by taking a stand with her, getting my own legs
shot out from under me. But I do blame myself. The faces of 138 men and women slip past me every
night, right after the sleeping pill. And how many Shies died? And how far away did someone feel their
agony as they suffocated and burned?
As I say, we should have thought things through, but we didn't. Veloz was our chance to make new
lives for ourselves, to turn a profit for our charter sponsors and earn ourselves the right to stay on the
planet, breathing clean air and living with a little elbow room. After the Kepler touched down and we
stood for the first time on our new world, Governor Meeker never stopped reminding us of what would
happen if we failed. None of us wanted to go back to Earth. We cleared an area in the forest around the
Kepler, built shelters from local materials, and then got right to work trying to find a new way to turn a
profit. We worked all out, fullthrot.
There were two main development teams: my team of physicists and planetary geologists, checking
into the composition of the planet, and Susan Suhl's group, investigating the planet's biology. I was
looking for minerals; she was looking for pharmaceuticals. Susan was our main hope. As it turned out, I
had more luck than she did, but now I'm getting ahead of myself.