"Jack Williamson - Hindsight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

HINDSIGHT
by Jack Williamson

SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH THE CIGAR.
But Brek Veronar didn't throw it away. Earthgrown tobacco was precious, here
on Ceres. He took another bite off the end, and pressed the lighter cone again. This
time, imperfectly, the cigar drewwith an acrid, puzzling odor of scorching paper.
Brek Veronarborn William Webster, Earthmanwas sitting in his big, wellfurnished
office, adjoining the arsenal laboratory. Beyond the perdurite windows, magnified in
the crystalline clarity of the asteroid's synthetic atmosphere, loomed a row of the
immense squat turret forts that guarded the Astrophon basetheir mighty
twentyfourinch rifles, coupled to the Veronar autosight, covered with their theoretical
range everything within Jupiter's orbit. A squadron of the fleet lay on the field
beyond, seven tremendous deadblack cigar shapes. Far off, above the rugged red
palisades of a second plateau, stood the manycolored domes and towers of
Astrophon itself, the Astrarch's capital.
A tall, gaunt man, Brek Veronar wore the bright, closefitting silks of the
Astrarchy. Dyed to conceal the increasing streaks of gray, his hair was perfumed
and curled. In abrupt contrast to the force of his gray, wideset eyes, his face was
white and smooth from cosmetic treatments. Only the cigar could have betrayed him
as a native of Earth, and Brek Veronar never smoked except here in his own locked
laboratory.
He didn't like to be called the Renegade.
Curiously, that whiff of burning paper swept his mind away from the intricate
drawing of a new rockettorpedo gyropilot pinned to a board on the desk before him,
and back across twenty years of time. It returned him to the university campus, on
the low yellow hills beside the ancient Martian city of Toranto the fateful day when
Bill Webster had renounced allegiance to his native Earth, for the Astrarch.
Tony Grimm and Elora Ronee had both objected. Tony was the freckled,
irresponsible redhead who had come out from Earth with him six years before, on
the other of the two annual engineering scholarships. Elora Ronee was the lovely
darkeyed Martian girldaughter of the professor of geodesics, and a proud
descendant of the first colonistswhom they both loved.
He walked with them, that dry, bright afternoon, out from the yellow adobe
buildings, across the rolling, stony, ochercolored desert. Tony's sunburned,
blueeyed face was grave for once, as he protested.
"You can't do it, Bill. No Earthman could."
"No use talking," said Bill Webster, shortly. "The Astrarch wants a military
engineer. His agents offered me twenty thousand eagles a year, with raises and
bonusesten times what any research scientist could hope to get, back on Earth."
The tanned, vivid face of Elora Ronee looked hurt. "Billwhat about your own
research?" the slender girl cried. "Your new reaction tube! You promised you were
going to break the Astrarch's monopoly on space transport. Have you forgotten?"
"The tube was just a dream," Bill Webster told her, "but probably it's the reason
he offered the contract to me, and not Tony. Such jobs don't go begging."
Tony caught his arm. "You can't turn against your own world, Bill," he insisted.
"You can't give up everything that means anything to an Earthman. Just remember
what the Astrarch isa superpirate."
Bill Webster's toe kicked up a puff of yellow dust. "I know history," he said. "I
know that the Astrarchy had its beginnings from the space pirates who established