"Utley, Steven - The Despoblado" - читать интересную книгу автора (Utley Steven)

Without, the view disappointed. The peneplained land appeared only as an off-white band separating the sea from the sky; the single emphatic note was provided by bright orange buoys marking a navigable channel among the delta's myriad braided courses. The Navy ship had stood well offshore to avoid the risk of running aground, for there was no abyssal ocean deep here, but inundated continental interior, with a gradient so slight that the land seemed simply to slip beneath the edge of the water like one sheet of paper under another.




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Michelle Kelly came back on deck and found herself a place to sit among some crates. A camera hung suspended on a strap encircling her neck, and from time to time she raised it, peered through the viewfinder, and snapped the shutter.
Moen appeared beside her and held out a bottle of water beaded with condensation. She hesitated, then accepted it and thanked him. She rolled the cool plastic across her forehead before she drank. "I could've stayed in Stinktown and been this hot and sticky. May I ask how far upriver you're going, Mister Moen?"

"Please call me John. We'll reach my camp tomorrow. We make better time once we're out of this swamp." He regarded her with frank curiosity. "You can't just be rattling around loose here."

"I'm not. What do you do, John?"

Her using his first name evidently made up for her evasiveness, for he smiled at her and said, "I'm a geologist."

She nodded toward the great yellow truck lashed to the deck. "So that's yours?"

"Yes. Fair being fair, tell me what you're doing here."

"I'm working, too. Seeing as much of this world as I can, while I can."

"Who's your sponsor?"

"I'm privately funded."

"So'm I."

"I'm here because my father has the money and my Uncle Ivan has the clout. Ivan Kelly?"

Moen shook his head.

"Before your time, I guess. He was the first man to go through the hole. And my dad's a Hollywood screenwriter, so the pressure was really on me to make something of my life. So here I am."

"Here you are."

"Once I leave, I'll never get to come back. You don't get to come back unless some multinational's footing the bill. You, for instance, will get to come back all you like. You're looking for oil."

He was taken aback but recovered quickly. "Yes, I'm looking for oil."

She nodded gravely. "What else would you be doing? I've seen aircraft flying around everywhere towing those little gliders with the magnetometers. And that"Чshe nodded at the truck againЧ"is a vibrator truck."

He looked at the truck as though it had suddenly materialized from thin air. "Why, so it is. And that salesman swore it was a rec vehicle."

She made a visible effort not to smile. "You jack it up on a central pedestal and make it vibrate, and then you use the sound waves in rock to make subsurface maps."

"You don't say."

Now she did smile, excellently.