"Bradbury, Ray - The Martian Chronicles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

Accordion, harmonica, wine, shout, dance, wail, roundabout, dash of pan, laughter.
Biggs weaved to the rim of the Martian canal. He carried six empty bottles and dropped them one by one into the deep blue canal waters. They made empty, hollow, drowning sounds as they sank.
"I christen thee, I christen thee, I christen thee--" said Biggs thickly. "I christen thee Biggs, Biggs, Biggs Canal--"
Spender was on his feet, over the fire, and alongside Biggs before anyone moved. He hit Biggs once in the teeth and once in the ear. Biggs toppled and fell down into the canal water. After the splash Spender waited silently for Biggs to climb back up onto the stone bank. By that time the men were holding Spender.
"Hey, what's eating you, Spender? Hey?" they asked.
Biggs climbed up and stood dripping. He saw the men holding Spender. "Well," he said, and started forward.
"That's enough," snapped Captain Wilder. The men broke away from Spender. Biggs stopped and glanced at the captain.
"All right, Biggs, get some dry clothes. You men, carry on your party! Spender, come with me!"
The men took up the party. Wilder moved off some distance and confronted Spender. "Suppose you explain what just happened," he said.
Spender looked at the canal. "I don't know, I was ashamed. Of Biggs and us and the noise. Christ, what a spectade."
"It's been a long trip. They've got to have their fling."
"Where's their respect, sir? Where's their sense of the right thing?"
"You're tired, and you've a different way of seeing things, Spender. That's a fifty-dollar fine for you."
"Yes, sir. It was just the idea of Them watching us make fools of ourselves."
"Them?"
"The Martians, whether they're dead or not."
"Most certainly dead," said the captain. "Do you think They know we're here?"
"Doesn't an old thing always know when a new thing comes?"
"I suppose so. You sound as if you believe in spirits."
"I believe in the things that were done, and there are evidences of many things done on Mars. There are streets and houses, and there are books, I imagine, and big canals and docks and places for stabling, if not horses, well, then some domestic animal, perhaps with twelve legs, who knows? Everywhere I look I see things that were _used_. They were touched and handled for centuries,
"Ask me, then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I'll say yes. They're all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we'll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we'll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. The names we'll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we'll never touch it. And then we'll get mad at it, and you know what we'll do? We'll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves."
"We won't ruin Mars," said the captain. "It's too big and too good."
"You think not? We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn't set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose. And Egypt is a small part of Earth. But here, this whole thing is ancient and different, and we have to set down somewhere and start fouling it up. We'll call the canal the Rockefeller Canal and the mountain King George Mountain and the sea the Dupont sea, and there'll be Roosevelt and Lincoln and Coolidge cities and it won't ever be right, when there are the _proper_ names for these places."
"That'll be your job, as archaeologists, to find out the old names, and we'll use them."
"A few men like us against all the commercial interests." Spender looked at the iron mountains. "_They_ know we're here tonight, to spit in their wine, and I imagine they hate us."
The captain shook his head. "There's no hatred here." He listened to the wind. "From the look of their cities they were a graceful, beautiful, and philosophical people. They accepted what came to them. They acceded to racial death, that much we know, and without a last-moment war of frustration to tumble down their cities. Every town we've seen so far has been flawlessly intact. They probably don't mind us being here any more than they'd mind children playing on the lawn, knowing and understanding children for what they are. And, anyway, perhaps all this will change us for the better.
"Did you notice the peculiar quiet of the men, Spender, until Biggs forced them to get happy? They looked pretty humble and frightened. Looking at all this, we know we're not so hot; we're kids in rompers, shouting with our play rockets and atoms, loud and alive. But one day Earth will be as Mars is today. This will sober us. It's an object lesson in civilizations. We'll learn from Mars. Now suck in your chin. Let's go back and play happy. That fifty-dollar fine still goes."

The party was not going too well. The wind kept coming in off the dead sea. It moved around the men and it moved around the captain and Jeff Spender as they returned to the group. The wind pulled at the dust and the shining rocket and pulled at the accordion, and the dust got into the vamped harmonica. The dust got in their eyes and the wind made a high singing sound in the air. As suddenly as it had come the wind died.
But the party had died too.
The men stood upright against the dark cold sky.
"Come on, gents, come on!" Biggs bounded from the ship in a fresh uniform, not looking at Spender even once. His voice was like someone in an empty auditorium. It was alone. "Come on!"
Nobody moved.
"Come on, Whitie, your harmonica!"
Whitie blew a chord. It sounded funny and wrong. Whitie knocked the moisture from his harmonica and put it away.
"What kinda party _is_ this?" Biggs wanted to know.
Someone hugged the accordion. It gave a sound like a dying animal. That was all.
"Okay, me and my bottle will go have our own party." Biggs squatted against the rocket, drinking from a flask.
Spender watched him. Spender did not move for a long time. Then his fingers crawled up along his trembling leg to his holstered pistol, very quietly, and stroked and tapped the leather sheath.
"All those who want to can come into the city with me," announced the captain. "We'll post a guard here at the rocket and go armed, just in case."
The men counted off. Fourteen of them wanted to go, including Biggs, who laughingly counted himself in, waving his bottle. Six others stayed behind.
"Here we go!" Biggs shouted.
The party moved out into the moonlight, silently. They made their way to the outer rim of the dreaming dead city in the light of the racing twin moons. Their shadows, under them, were double shadows. They did not breathe, or seemed not to, perhaps, for several minutes. They were waiting for something to stir in the dead city, some gray form to rise, some ancient, ancestral shape to come galloping across the vacant sea bottom on an ancient, armored steel of impossible lineage, of unbelievable derivation.
Spender filled the streets with his eyes and his mind. People moved like blue vapor lights on the cobbled avenues, and there were faint murmurs of sound, and odd animals scurrying across the gray-red sands. Each window was given a person who leaned from it and waved slowly, as if under a timeless water, at some moving form in the fathoms of space below the moon-silvered towers. Music was played on some inner ear, and Spender imagined the shape of such instruments to evoke such music. The land was haunted.
"Hey!" shouted Biggs, standing tall, his hands around his open mouth. "Hey, you people in the city there, you!"
"Biggs!" said the captain.
Biggs quieted.
They walked forward on a tiled avenue. They were all whispering now, for it was like entering a vast open library or a mausoleum in which the wind lived and over which the stars shone. The captain spoke quietly. He wondered where the people had gone, and what they had been, and who their kings were, and how they had died. And he wondered, quietly aloud, how they had built this city to last the ages through, and had they ever come to Earth? Were they ancestors of Earth Men ten thousand years removed? And had they loved and hated similar loves and hates, and done similar silly things when silly things were done?
Nobody moved. The moons held and froze them; the wind beat slowly around them.
"Lord Byron," said Jeff Spender.