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

The boat entered the mouth of the channel. The brown, turbid water was choked with broad algal mats, some of them more than a yard across. Built of delicate interlaced filaments, they looked more solid than they were; they disintegrated into their constituent strands as the boat eased through them. Here and there low muddy islets supported other algal growth. The air was heavy with a stench of decomposition.

"A pomander would be handy right about now," she said.

Moen nodded. "Or nose plugs. But it smells ten times worse when the tide's out. The mud here's of such fine consistency that it feels like oil when you rub it between your fingertips. You'd sink right into it, over your head. The particles in it are all that's left of a mountain range. It's all been worn away and dumped here in a geosyncline. And it's full of decaying stuff."

"Charles Darwin said a wide expanse of muddy water has neither grandeur nor beauty."

"Smart old Charlie."

They saw a large, honey-colored arthropod, with bristly black grasping appendages outstretched, that had pulled itself onto an islet. It lay perfectly still among intorted tendrils of foliage and might have been looking around or listening or simply basking. Moen observed unnecessarily that there was little for it to see and nothing for it to hear. He opined that the creature's eyes probably did not work very well, and he expressed doubt that it even possessed ears.

She asked, "Are you an expert on sea scorpions?"

He shook his head. "No, not really. I was just repeating what some paleontologist said. I know my forams and conodontsЧthose are the index fossils I use in my workЧbut I don't know all that much about other Paleozoic life-forms and don't have much interest in them, frankly."

"Just in oil."

"Oil's fascinating. It's a product of a chain of improbable occurrences."

Michelle crossed her arms, leaned against the rail with her hip, and faced him. "I don't understand," she said, "how you propose to get the oil back even if you do find it. You can't pump it through the hole, and taking it out by the barrel would be prohibitively expensive."

He shrugged. "I'm sure there're people trying to figure that out. My job is just to find it. So. Can't we be friends in spite of everything?"

She gave him an appraising look. "I'm not sure I could be friends with anybody who thinks the way you do."

He laughed pleasantly. "Well, you're young, and I work for a big old evil multinational. We're supposed to have extremely definite opinions. But wait till we get to my camp and you meet Dews. You'll love Dews. Dews," and he laughed again, "is pure unreconstructed slash-and-burn, suck-it-dry, throw-it-away."

"Can't wait," she murmured.




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Walton glumly watched Moen and the young woman from the pilothouse. He noted how Moen had moved closer to her without appearing to realize that he was doing so. For a moment, both of them stood leaning on the rail, arms folded, elbows almost touching. Then Michelle casually turned away and incidentally increased the distance between Moen and herself without appearing to realize that she had done so. It struck Walton that Moen almost succeeded at covering his disappointment.



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The two people at the rail were quiet for a time. The unchanging landscape glided past. Then Michelle asked where the facilities were, and Moen directed her belowdecks.
When she returned, she indicated the pilothouse and its occupant with a nod and said, "Give me your extremely definite opinion of Walton and Wicket. There's more to them than meets the eye."

"You might better ask Walton about Walton. I've known him a while now. I've spent maybe eight years here, if you add up my field time, and in all that time I don't think I've ever seen or heard of him venturing more than a quarter mile from water. He's got the boatman's view of the worldЧa navigable body of water bounded on one to three sides by terra incognita. There're probably sea scorpions with drier feet than Walton's."

"What about Wicket?"