"Blish, James - Pheonix Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

PHOENIX PLANET
by James Blish
(Author of "Callistan Cabal," "Citadel of Thought," etc.)
Marshall went into space to seek extra-terrestrial life; he returned to find
that what he had sought had paid his home planet a visit. And had come to stay!



CHAPTER I
GREGORY MARSHALL paced a five-foot circle around the metal floor. Five feet was
the maximum diameter of the circle the tiny control cabin of the Icarus allowed
for pacing, and for a man of Marshall's size and state of mind it was a very
inadequate size indeed.
For Gregory Marshall, first human being ever to leave the prisoning air of
Earth, was going back to Earth again. Going home after ten of Earth's too-long
years, ten years of eating vitamin concentrates, egg powder, milk powder, and
the incredibly-tough leaves of the Martian plants he called "spinage" or
"cabbich" as the mood struck him. Ten years of gasping for air at the slightest
exertion. Ten years of freezing almost solid at night, and being painfully
sun-burned at forty degrees Fahrenheit by day. Ten years of searching,
searching, searching.
Ten years it had taken him to assemble the metal for the device his landing had
smashed. He caressed the crude thing, a cubical cage-work of wires placed just
below the control window, and a little model of the Icarus which ran along the
wires, and grinned ruefully to himself.
It was the nature of the man that he could grin at all, with any other feeling
than that of cynicism, for that landing misfortune and its consequences would
have killed any other man's sense of humor completely. How neatly everything had
been figured out! The pressed-cast wood ship, held together with metal rings
every few feet like barrelhoops, with its single protective layer of
heat-resistant plastic coated with a resin-base reflectant paint, had been so
much lighter than a metal ship would have been, and the new fuel was so
powerful--nothing but a miscalculation of orbit could have prevented his making
the trip safely, and the return as well. And he had been picked from all the
rest of the Society because of his cool head and his mathematical skill.
He had not miscalculated. He had made Mars. And then, then the twanging collapse
of parachute shrouds, the wild plunge, the violent shock as the Icarus dropped
twenty feet and buried its nose in soft sand--and he came to consciousness in
the midst of the crumpled control cage. . . .
The metal had been very hard steel, and the fine wires had shivered and broken,
cutting him badly. He didn't care about the cuts--they healed quickly in the
sterile air of Mars--but that shivered metal, with its high molybdenum content,
could never be reworked by any means at his disposal. He had plenty of fuel,
yes. But the little space-flyer was useless without that control cage.
The nightmare was over now. The new cage was of gold, pure, soft gold, obtained
from the ruined city which lay buried in the "spinage" of the Mare Icarium. How
he had longed to explore that incredibly ancient metropolis with the eyes of a
scientist, as the Society had intended he should! But he had no time for
anything but hasty pictures filmed as he passed by in his endless search for
malleable metal. That gold had come, ounce by precious ounce, from ornaments and