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

It was lava. Whole areas had been fused as if with tremendous heat. He thought
of the teeming millions in the city, and felt suddenly ill. Had the city been
evacuated before the cataclysm, whatever it had been, had struck? Had there been
adequate warning? Or--had the upheaval been even more widespread? Perhaps the
war, crawling to an exhausted close when he left, had flared again. But what war
weapon could wipe out a city so cleanly, melt it to glassy puddles like this?
He thought for a moment of going on to Chicago, in what he strangely felt to be
a hopeless quest for life, but his fuel meter warned him he could stay in the
air only a few minutes longer. Desperately he swung the ship south and up, and
moved the little metal oval almost halfway forward in the cage. The Icarus
roared and he was forced into his seat.
Then the rear tubes began to cough. He searched the board for the valve of
Keller's favorite and much-discussed emergency pump ("Only thirteen pounds," he
could hear the little man pleading, "and so handy for accidents."), twisted it
hard, and the reserve in the forward tubes was forced back. Again the Icarus
bucked and bounded upward, but the coughing began again and black smoke began to
pour from the Venturi orifices, wreathing the tail of the ship in a trailing
dense pall. Oxygen gone. The fuel was useless now--might as well save it;
without oxygen the tubes had no more thrust than a blowtorch. He cut the feed
throttles.
The Icarus was falling now in a great arc, gliding on its truncated wings,
losing speed rapidly. He searched the horizon, but if he were anywhere near
Philadelphia, it must have been destroyed as well; there was nothing but the
endless scrub forest. Bitterly he watched the speed, and when the ship could no
longer stay in the air on momentum, he tripped the parachute lever.
He could hear its opening boom through the hull, and the shock almost cut him in
two on the safety belt. Swaying like a pendulum, the Icarus settled after twelve
years on the surface of its home planet--from sterile desert to empty
wilderness. Abruptly Gregory Marshall felt very tired. Dully he watched the
green roof rise to meet him.
Then he was rocked violently and branches crashed outside--another dull
shock--and the Icarus swayed gently back and forth on the end of the tangled
shrouds, perhaps a yard from the ground.
"The Earth won't have me," he thought, smiling without humor. He unstrapped
himself, and the entrance-port wheel squealed in his hands.
For a moment he stood beside his suspended flyer, breathing deeply of the heady
air, wine-like after Mars and the canned stuff in the ship. The strange, subtle
odor of green things was everywhere, and when he stamped his feet on the rich
black sod he knew again a long-forgotten natural weight. Home. Home changed very
terribly, but still life after living death.
He sighed and gave the Icarus a short inspection. There was a tiny fraction of
gritty red sand wedged in a crack where the tubes joined the fuselage, and the
knowledge that it was Martian gave him a greater sensation of awe than all the
films stored in the cabin. Nothing seemed to be damaged; the lightness of the
steel-strong wood composition had protected it from coming to grief among the
small trees. He whistled softly to himself and ran his fingers along a long,
deep burn. The paint and protective plastic had been seared away and charred
wood showed underneath. That must have happened during that accidental
two-thousand-foot drop. Any more and--well, the Icarus wouldn't be spaceworthy
again until he could have that spot repaired.