"John Varley - Picnic On Nearside" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

The bomb was a metal cylinder, a meter high, two meters long, mounted on four steerable
wheels. There was an array of four television cameras mounted on top of the cylinder, slowly scanning
through ninety degrees. No one could recall how it came to be there. It looked a little like the
municipal street-cleaning machines; perhaps no one had noticed it because of that.

"I am rated at fifty kilotons," the bomb said, with a trace of pride.

The police were called.



"A nuclear bomb, you say?" Municipal Police Chief Anna-Louise Bach felt sourness in the pit of
her stomach and reached for a box of medicated candy. She was overdue for a new stomach, but the
rate she went through them on her job coupled with the size of her paycheck had caused her to rely
more and more on these stopgap measures. And the cost of cloned transplants was going up.

"It says fifty kilotons," said the man on the screen. "I don't see what else it could be. Unless it's
just faking, of course. We're moving in radiation detectors."

"You said 'it says.' Are you speaking of a note, or phone call, or what?"

"No. It's talking to us. Seems friendly enough, too, but we haven't gotten around to asking it to
disarm itself. It could be that its friendliness won't extend that far."

"No doubt." She ate another candy. "Call in the bomb squad, of course. Then tell them to do
nothing until I arrive, other than look the situation over. I'm going to make a few calls, then I'll be there.
No more than thirty minutes."

"All right. Will do."

There was nothing for it but to look for help. No nuclear bomb had ever been used on Luna.
Bach had no experience with them, nor did her bomb crew. She brought her computer on line.



Roger Birkson liked his job. It wasn't so much the working conditionsтАФwhich were
appallingтАФbut the fringe benefits. He was on call for thirty days, twenty-four hours a day, at a salary
that was nearly astronomical. Then he got eleven months paid vacation. He was paid for the entire
year whether or not he ever had to exercise his special talents during his thirty days duty. In that way,
he was like a firefighter. In a way, he was a firefighter.

He spent his long vacations in Luna. No one had ever asked Birkson why he did so; had they
asked, he would not have known. But the reason was a subconscious conviction that one day the
entire planet Earth would blow up in one glorious fireball. He didn't want to be there when it
happened.

Birkson's job was bomb disarming for the geopolitical administrative unit called CommEcon
Europe. On a busy shift he might save the lives of twenty million CE Europeans.

Of the thirty-five Terran bomb experts vacationing on Luna at the time of the Leystrasse bomb