JК
World Of Ptavvs :: Нивен Ларри
Страница: 21 из 127The battle for food had been very fierce among the thrint's dumbancestors. But he had cigarettes. He smoked and found that he liked it, although he had to fight an urge to chew the filter.
Where was he? He let Larry Greenberg's memory come to the surface. High school. History class, with lousy grades. The race for space; Moon bases; Mars bases. The Belt. Colonization of the Belt. The economics behind the Belt. Confinement Asteroid. Overpopulation on Earth. Fertility Laws; Fertility Board; Superman Insurrection. Sanction against the Belt, during an argument over the use of the Jovian moons. There was a lot of extraneous material coming through, but Kzanol was getting a good picture of the solar system. He was on the third planet, and it was binary. He had been extremely lucky to hit it.
The UN power sender on Mercury. Failure of the economic sanction. Limits of Belt autonomicity. Industrial warfare. Why was the Belt being treated as a villain? Forget it. Belt mining of Saturn's rings for water. Saturn's rings. Rings!
"Youch!" Kzanol hurled the cigarette butt away and stuffed his burnt fingers in his mouth.
F124. So this is F124, he thought. It doesn't look like F124. He started to shiver, so he turned up the heater.
At one-thirty Judy got up and went out. The nightmare feeling had become too much to bear, alone in the dark. And Larry hadn't called.
A cab dropped to the corner in answer to her ring. She didn't know the address of the UCLA Physics Level, but there was a phone in the cab. She had Information type the address on the cab destination board. The cab whirred and rose.
Judy leaned back in the soft seat. She was tired, even though she couldn't sleep.
The enormous pillar that was UCLA blazed with light; but these were night lights, to protect the structure from aircraft. Yet- a level halfway up was three times as bright as the rest. Judy guessed which level this was, even before the cab started down. As they swooped toward the landing balcony she noticed other details.
The big square vehicle was an ambulance, one with large capacity. Those little cars with the extended motor housings were police. There were tiny figures moving around.
Automatically Kzanol lit his last cigarette. His mouth and throat were raw; was that normal? He remembered that it wasn't, except when he had been smoking far too much.
… And then the Time of Ripening would come. Suddenly everyone would be in a hurry; Dad and Grandpa would return to the house very late and bone-tired, and the slaves never rested at all. All day and night there was the sound of trees being. felled, and the low whirr of the stripping plant.
Where was he? He let Larry Greenberg's memory come to the surface. High school. History class, with lousy grades. The race for space; Moon bases; Mars bases. The Belt. Colonization of the Belt. The economics behind the Belt. Confinement Asteroid. Overpopulation on Earth. Fertility Laws; Fertility Board; Superman Insurrection. Sanction against the Belt, during an argument over the use of the Jovian moons. There was a lot of extraneous material coming through, but Kzanol was getting a good picture of the solar system. He was on the third planet, and it was binary. He had been extremely lucky to hit it.
The UN power sender on Mercury. Failure of the economic sanction. Limits of Belt autonomicity. Industrial warfare. Why was the Belt being treated as a villain? Forget it. Belt mining of Saturn's rings for water. Saturn's rings. Rings!
"Youch!" Kzanol hurled the cigarette butt away and stuffed his burnt fingers in his mouth.
F124. So this is F124, he thought. It doesn't look like F124. He started to shiver, so he turned up the heater.
At one-thirty Judy got up and went out. The nightmare feeling had become too much to bear, alone in the dark. And Larry hadn't called.
A cab dropped to the corner in answer to her ring. She didn't know the address of the UCLA Physics Level, but there was a phone in the cab. She had Information type the address on the cab destination board. The cab whirred and rose.
Judy leaned back in the soft seat. She was tired, even though she couldn't sleep.
The enormous pillar that was UCLA blazed with light; but these were night lights, to protect the structure from aircraft. Yet- a level halfway up was three times as bright as the rest. Judy guessed which level this was, even before the cab started down. As they swooped toward the landing balcony she noticed other details.
The big square vehicle was an ambulance, one with large capacity. Those little cars with the extended motor housings were police. There were tiny figures moving around.
Automatically Kzanol lit his last cigarette. His mouth and throat were raw; was that normal? He remembered that it wasn't, except when he had been smoking far too much.
… And then the Time of Ripening would come. Suddenly everyone would be in a hurry; Dad and Grandpa would return to the house very late and bone-tired, and the slaves never rested at all. All day and night there was the sound of trees being. felled, and the low whirr of the stripping plant.