"EB - Edward L. Ferman - The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction 23rd EditionUC - SS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine)

She was answered by quiet assent and nods of the head. She did not acknowledge it but plowed right on.
"I wondered from the start why you were along, Crawford." She was pacing slowly back and forth in the crowded space. The others got out of her way almost without thinking, except for Ralston who still huddled under his blanket. "A historian? Sure, it's a fine idea, but pretty impractical. I have to admit that I've been thinking of you
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as a luxury, and about as useful as the nipples on a man's chest. But I was wrong. All the NASA people were wrong. The Astronaut Corps fought like crazy to keep you off this trip. Time enough for that on later flights. We were blinded by our loyalty to the test-pilot philosophy of space flight. We wanted as few scientists as possible and as many astronauts as we could manage. We don't like to think of ourselves as ferry-boat pilots. I think we demonstrated during Apollo that we could handle science jobs as well as anyone. We saw you as a kind of insult, a slap in the face by the scientists in Houston to show us how low our stock has fallen."
"If I might be able to-"
"Shut up. But we were wrong. I read in your resume that you were quite a student of survival. What's your honest assessment of our chances?"
Crawford shrugged, uneasy at the question. He didn't know if it was the right time to even postulate that they might fail.
"Tell me the truth."
"Pretty slim. Mostly the air problem. The people I've read about never sank so low that they had to worry about where their next breath was coming from."
"Have you ever heard of Apollo 13?"
He smiled at her. "Special circumstances. Short-term problems."
"You're right, of course. And in the only two other real space emergencies since that time, all hands were lost." She turned and scowled at each of them in turn.
"But we're -not going to lose." She dared any of them to disagree, and no one was about to. She relaxed and resumed her stroll around the room. She turned to Crawford again.
"I can see I'll be drawing on your knowledge a lot in the years to come. What do you see as the next order of business?"
Crawford relaxed. The awful burden of responsibility, which he had never wanted, was gone. He was content to follow her lead.
"To tell you the truth, I was wondering what to say next. We have to make a thorough inventory. I guess we should start on that."
"That's fine, but there is an even more important order of business. We have to go out to the dome and find out what the hell caused the blowout. The damn thing should not have blown; it's the first of its type to do so. And from the bottom. But it did blow, and
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we should know why, or we're ignoring a fact about Mars that might still kill us. Let's do that first. Ralston, can you walk?"
When he nodded, she sealed her helmet and started into the lock. She turned and looked speculatively at Crawford.
"I swear, man, if you had touched me with a cattle prod you couldn't have got a bigger rise out of me than you did with what you said a few minutes ago. Do I dare ask?"
Crawford was not about to answer. He said, with a perfectly straight face, "Me? Maybe you should just assume I'm a chauvinist."
"We'll see, won't we?"
"What is that stuff?"
Song Sue Lee was on her knees, examining one of the hundreds of short, stiff spikes extruding from the ground. She tried to scratch her head but was frustrated by her helmet.
"It looks like plastic. But I have a strong feeling it's the higher life-form Lucy and I were looking for yesterday."
"And you're telling me those little spikes are what poked holes in the dome bottom? I'm not buying that."
Song straightened up, moving stiffly. They had all worked hard to empty out the collapsed dome and peel back the whole, bulky mess to reveal the ground it had covered. She was tired and stepped out of character for a moment to snap at Mary Lang.
"I didn't tell you that. We pulled the dome back and found spikes. It was your inference that they poked holes in the bottom."
"I'm sorry," Lang said quietly. "Go on with what you were saying."
"Well," Song admitted, "it wasn't a bad inference, at that. But the holes I saw were not punched through. They were eaten away." She waited for Lang to protest that the dome bottom was about as chemically inert as any plastic yet devised. But Lang had learned her lesson. And she had a talent for facing facts.
"So. We have a thing here that eats plastic. And seems to be made of plastic, into the bargain. Any ideas why it picked this particular spot to grow, and no other?"
"I have an idea on that," McKillian said. 'Tve had it in mind to do some studies around the dome to see if the altered moisture content we've been creating here had any effect on the spores hi the soil. See, we've been here nine days, spouting out water vapor, carbon
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dioxide, and quite a bit of oxygen into the atmosphere. Not much, but maybe more than it seems, considering the low concentrations that are naturally available. We've altered the biome. Does anyone know where the exhaust air from the dome was expelled?"
Lang raised her eyebrows. "Yes, it was under the dome. The air we exhausted was warm, you see, and it was thought it could be put to use one last time before we let it go, to warm the floor of the dome and decrease heat loss."
"And the water vapor collected on the underside of the dome when it hit the cold air. Right, Do you get the picture?"
"I think so," Lang said. "It was so little water, though. You know we didn't want to waste it; we condensed it out until the air we exhausted was dry as a bone."
"For Earth, maybe. Here it was a torrential rainfall. It reached seeds or spores in the ground and triggered them to start growing. We're going to have to watch it when we use anything containing plastic. What does that include?"
Lang groaned. "All the air-lock seals, for one thing." There were grimaces from all of them at the thought of that. "For another, a good part of our suits. Song, watch it, don't step on that thing. We don't know bow powerful it is or if it'll eat the-plastic in your boots, but we'd better play it safe. How about it, Ralston? Think you can find out how bad it is?"
"You mean identify the solvent these things use? Probably, if we can get some sort of work space and I can get to my equipment"
"Mary," McKillian said, "it occurs to me that I'd better start looking for airborne spores. If there are some, it could mean that the airlock on the Podkayne is vulnerable. Even thirty meters off the ground."
"Right. Get on that. Since we're sleeping in it until we can find out what we can do on the ground, we'd best be sure it's safe. Meantime, well all sleep in our suits." There were helpless groans at this, but no protests. McKillian and Ralston headed for the pile of salvaged equipment, hoping to rescue enough to get started on their analyses. Song knelt again and started digging around one of the ten-centimeter spikes.
Crawford followed Lang back toward the Podkayne.
"Mary, I wanted. . . is it all right if I call you Mary?"
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