"George Zebrowski - The Water Sculptor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zebrowski George)

The Water Sculptor

by George Zebrowski
Sitting there, watching the Earth below him from the panel of Station Six, Christian
Praeger suddenly felt embarrassed by the planet's beauty. For the last eight hours he
had watched the great storm develop in the Pacific, and he had wanted to share the
view with someone, tell someone how beautiful he thought it was. He had told it to
himself now for the fiftieth time.

The storm was a physical evil, a spinning hell that might reach the Asian mainland
and kill thousands of starving billions. They would get a warning, for all the good
that would do. Since the turn of the century there had been dozens of such storms,
developing in places way off from the traditional storm cradles.

He looked at the delicate pinwheel. It was a part of the planet's ecologyтАФwhatever
state that was in now. The arms of the storm reminded him of the theory which held
the galaxy to be a kind of organized storm system which sucked in gas and dust at
its center and sent it all out into the vast arms to condense into stars. And the stars
were stormy laboratories building the stuff of the universe in the direction of huge
molecules, from the inanimate and crystalline to the living and conscious. In the
slowness of time it all looked stable, Praeger thought, but almost certainly all storms
run down and die.

He looked at the clock above the center screen. There were six clocks around the
watch room, one above each screen. The clock on the ceiling gave station time. His
watch would be over in half an hour.

He looked at the sun screen. There all the dangerous rays were filtered out. He
turned up the electronic magnification and for a long time watched the prominences
flare up and die. He looked at the cancerous sunspots. The sight was hypnotic and
frightening no matter how many times he had seen it. He put his hand out to the
computer panel and punched in the routine information. Then he looked at the
spectroscopic screens, small rectangles beneath the Earth watch monitors. He
checked the time and set the automatic release for the ozone scatter-canisters to be
dropped into the atmosphere. A few minutes later he watched them drop away from
the station, following their fall until they broke in the upper atmosphere, releasing the
precious ozone that would protect Earth's masses from the sun's deadly radiation.
Early in the twentieth century a good deal of the natural ozone layer in the upper
atmosphere had been stripped away as a result of atomic testing and the use of
aerosol sprays, resulting in much genetic damage in the late eighties and nineties. But
soon now the ozone layer would be back up to snuff.
When his watch ended ten minutes later, Praeger was glad to get away from the
visual barrage of the screens. He made his way into one of the jutting spokes of the
station where his sleep cubicle was located. Here it was a comfortable half-g all the
time. He settled himself into his bunk and pushed the music button at his side,
leaving his small observation and com screen on the ceiling turned off. Gradually the
music filled the room and he closed his eyes. Mahler's weary song of Earth's misery
enveloped his consciousness with pity and weariness, and love. Before he fell asleep
he wished he might feel the Earth's atmosphere the way he felt his own skin.