"William Tenn - The Human Angle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

A-bomb, H-bomb, and C-bomb because information that they existed had been
declassified. You don't know about the other weapons being devised-and neither did
we, reasonably enough, since they weren't our business-but we had been given
properly guarded notification that they were in the works. Project Hush was set up to
counter the new weapons.
Our goal was not just to reach the Moon. We had done that on June 24, 1967 with
an unmanned ship that carried in-struments to report back data on soil, temperature,
cosmic rays and so on. Unfortunately, it was put out of commission by a rock slide.
An unmanned rocket would be useless against the new weapons. We had to get to
the Moon before any other country did and set up a permanent station-an armed
one-and do it without anybody else knowing about it.
I guess you see now why we on (damn the name!) Project Hush were so
concerned about security. But we felt pretty sure, before we took off, that we had
plugged every possible leak.
We had, all right. Nobody even knew we had raised ship.

We landed at the northern tip of Mare Nubium, just off Regiomontanus, and, after
planting a flag with appropriate throat-catching ceremony, had swung into the
realities of the tasks we had practiced on so many dry runs back on Earth.
Major Monroe Gridley prepared the big rocket, with its tiny cubicle of living
space, for the return journey to Earth which he alone would make.
Lieutenant-colonel Thomas Hawthorne painstakingly ex-amined our provisions
and portable quarters for any damage that might have been incurred in landing.
And I, Colonel Benjamin Rice, first commanding officer of Army Base No. 1 on
the Moon, dragged crate after enormous crate out of the ship on my aching
academic back and piled them in the spot two hundred feet away where the plastic
dome would be built.
We all finished at just about the same time, as per schedule, and went into Phase
Two.
Monroe and I started work on building the dome. It was a simple prefab affair,
but big enough to require an awful lot of assembling. Then, after it was built, we
faced the real prob-lem-getting all the complex internal machinery in place and in
operating order.
Meanwhile, Tom Hawthorne took his plump self off in the single-seater rocket
which, up to then, had doubled as a life-boat.
The schedule called for him to make a rough three-hour scouting survey in an
ever-widening spiral from our dome. This had been regarded as a probable waste of
time, rocket fuel, and manpower-but a necessary precaution. He was supposed to
watch for such things as bug-eyed monsters out for a stroll on the Lunar landscape.
Basically, however, Tom's survey was intended to supply extra geological and
astronom-ical meat for the report which Monroe was to carry back to Army
Headquarters on Earth.
Tom was back in forty minutes. His round face, inside its transparent bubble
helmet, was fish-belly white. And so were ours, once he told us what he'd seen.
He had seen another dome.
"The other side of Mare Nubium-in the Riphaen Moun-tains," he babbled
excitedly. "It's a little bigger than ours, and it's a little flatter on top. And it's not
translucent, either, with splotches of different colors here and there-it's a dull, dark,
heavy gray. But that's all there is to see."
"No markings on the dome?" I asked worriedly. "No signs of anyone-or