"Bud Sparhawk - Alba Krystal" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sparhawk Bud)

Doc debated it for a long while before he finally agreed and that made the decision unanimous. It wasn't
that old Doc was a prude, you see, it was just that he knew we'd all want him to talk it over with Alba.
She was less likely to take it the wrong way coming from him -- being older and more mature. Shoot,
he'll be thirty next month and that's mature!

Alba not only agreed to the idea but thought it was utterly fantastic. Seems that she thought that
modification did something to a man and that our attempts at politeness, as she put it, were for physical
reasons.

Did I say she thought it was a good idea? That very night she posted a schedule on her door. The walls
of the monastery came tumbling down unheard around us in our eagerness to test this new relationship.
From that night on things really hummed around the place. Not only did

our production pick up but even the station seemed a brighter, more lovable home. Alice's occasional
lapses of memory went unnoticed. Jerome stopped counting the days until his end of tour and James quit
constructing the elaborate budget for spending his accumulated wealth when his own end of tour came. I
stopped keeping my chronicle for a while and took a new interest in the others.

Looking back it seemed strange that we hadn't noticed how very dull and constricted our lives had been.
It was less strange that after her arrival we should all be so happy and congenial. Courtesy and
politeness, never our forte, became the watchword. Oh, those were the good times!

But with the happy life we grew careless and forgot the reason she'd come to the station, so much had
she become a part of our lives.

Jack found a rich pyrad return on its way up through the P25 layer. It was a once in a lifetime find, if the
radar map could be believed; chunks of high-grade ore reflecting stars of unbelievable brilliance. That
night we all whooped and shouted. Even Doc got a little high, swearing that he was going to have the
surgeons give him a Hanzeloid body, a hulking seven foot giant used more for soldiering than work. After
that he was going to spend the rest of his life intimidating the shorter mortals.

James added a few dozen brothels to his growing list and the rest of us made glowing boasts about the
grand lives we'd all lead. All we had to do was reach out and grab the fortune from Grimm before it
returned to the surface. The intercepts showed we could hit it at P22 the next day, halfway around
Grimm from our station. After that we could buy off our remaining time and return to the good life, we
promised ourselves.

Rather than leave one of us behind we decided that we all should go; after all, one coordinator and three
crews of two could cut operating time and increase our chances of collecting the maximum ore in the
shortest time. That's a very big plus when you're working in twenty-two atmospheres.

Krystal was checked out on the station and could handle Alice without trouble. Besides, we reasoned,
what could happen out here? We never learn, it seems.

The next morning as we hurtled toward Grimm we began compressing and brought the interior of the
transport up to its normal fifteen atmospheres. Always better to hit the atmosphere with the interior at
pressure -- keeps the mind clear with all that dissolved oxygen in the blood, I suppose.

Our dive was normal enough; two loops around the planet while its gravity hauled us down through the
thin atmosphere -- where the pressure was a mere Earth normal, one atmosphere -- to the point where