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

"I guess so. I don't think "Commander Long* would wear well over five years. But you'd better still think commander."
He considered it. "All right, Commander Mary." She punched him playfully. She had barely known him before the disaster. He had been a name on a roster and a sore spot in the estimation of the Astronaut Corps. But she had borne him no personal malice, and now found herself beginning to like him.
"What's on your mind?"
"Ah, several things. But maybe it isn't my place to bring them up now. First, I want to say that if you're ... ah, concerned, or doubtful of my support or loyalty because I took over command for a while. . . earlier today, well. . ."
"Well?"
"I just wanted to tell you that I have no ambitions in that direction," he finished lamely.
She patted him on the back. "Sure, I know. You forget, I read your dossier. It mentioned several interesting episodes that Fd like you to tell me about someday, from your 'soldier-of-fortune* daysЧ"
"Hell, those were grossly overblown. I just happened to get into some scrapes and managed to get out of them."
"Still, it got you picked for this mission out of hundreds of applicants. The thinking was that you'd be a wild card, a man of action with proven survivability. Maybe it worked out. But the other thing I remember on your card was that you're not a leader. No, that you're a loner who'll cooperate with a group and be no discipline problem, but you work better alone. Want to strike out on your own?"
He smiled at her. "No, thanks. But what you said is right I have no hankering to take charge of anything. But I do have some knowledge that might prove useful."
"And well use it. You just speak up, 1*11 be listening." She started to say something, then thought of something else. "Say, what are your ideas on a woman bossing this project? I've had to fight that all the way from my Air Force days. So if you have any objections you might as well tell me up front"
He was genuinely surprised. "You didn't take that crack seriously, did you? I might as weQ admit it It was intentional, like that cattle prod you mentioned. You looked like you needed a kick in the ass.**
"And thank you. But you didn't answer my question."
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"Those who lead, lead," he said, simply. "Til follow you as long as you keep leading,"
"As long as it's in the direction you want?" She laughed, and poked him in the ribs. "I see you as my Grand Vizier, the man who holds the arcane knowledge and advises the regent. I think Til have to watch out for you. I know a little history, myself."
Crawford couldn't tell how serious she was. He shrugged it off.
"What I really wanted to talk to you about is this: You said you couldn't fly this ship. But you were not yourself, you were depressed and feeling hopeless. Does that still stand?"
"It stands. Come on up and I'll show you why."
In the pilot's cabin, Crawford was ready to believe her. Like all flying machines since the days of the windsock and open cockpit, this one was a mad confusion of dials, switches, and lights designed to awe anyone who knew nothing about it. He sat in the copilot's chair and listened to her.
"We had a back-up pilot, of course. You may be surprised to learn that it wasn't me. It was Dorothy Cantrell, and she's dead. Now I know what everything does on this board, and I can cope with most of it easily. What I don't know, I could learn. Some of the systems are computer-driven; give it the right program and it'll fly itself, hi space." She looked longingly at the controls, and Crawford realized that, like Weinstein, she didn't relish giving up the fun of flying to boss a gang of explorers. She was a former test pilot, and above all things she ioved flying. She patted an array of hand controls on her right side. There were more like them on the left.
"This is what would kill us, Crawford. What's your first name? Matt. Matt, this baby is a flyer for the first forty thousand meters. It doesn't have the juice to orbit on the jets alone. The wings are folded up now. You probably didn't see them on the way in, but you saw the models. They're very light, supercritical, and designed for this atmosphere. Lou said it was like flying a bathtub, but it flew. And it's a skQl, almost an art. Lou practiced for three years on the best simulators we could build and still had to rely on things you can't learn in a simulator. And he barely got us down in one piece. We didn't noise it around, but it was a damn close thing. Lou was young; so was Cantrell. They were both fresh from flying. They flew every day, they had the feel for it. They were tops." She slumped back into her chair. "I haven't flown anything but trainers for eight years."
In the Hall of the Martian Kings 129
Crawford didn't know if he should let it drop.
"But you were one of the best, everyone knows that. You still don't think you could do it?"
She threw up her hands. "How can I make you understand? This is nothing like anything I've ever flown. You might as well. . ." She groped for a comparison, trying to coax it out with gestures in the air. "Listen. Does the fact that someone can fly a biplane, maybe even be the best goddamn biplane pilot that ever was, does that mean they're qualified to fly a helicopter?"
"I don't know."
"It doesn't. Believe me."
"All right. But the fact remains that you're the closest thing on Mars to a pilot for the Podkayne. I think you should consider that when you're deciding what we should do." He shut up, afraid to sound like he was pushing her.
She narrowed her eyes and gazed at nothing.
"I have thought about it." She waited for a long time. "I think the chances are about a thousand to one against us if I try to fly it. But Til do it, if we come to that. And that's your job. Showing me some better odds. If you can't, let me know."
Three weeks later, the Tharsis Canyon had been transformed into a child's garden of toys. Crawford had thought of no better way to describe it. Each of the plastic spikes had blossomed into a fanciful windmill, no two of them just alike. There were tiny ones, with the vanes parallel to the ground and no more than ten centimeters tall. There were derricks of spidery plastic struts that would not have looked too out of place on a Kansas farm. Some of them were five meters high. They came in all colors and many configurations, but all had vanes covered with a transparent film like cellophane, and all were spinning into colorful blurs in the stiff Martian breeze. Crawford thought of an industrial park built by gnomes. He could almost see them trudging through the spinning wheels.
Song had taken one apart as well as she could. She was still shaking her head in disbelief. She had not been able to excavate the long insulated taproot, but she could infer how deep it went. It extended all the way down to the layer of permafrost, twenty meters down.
The ground between the windmills was coated in shimmering plastic. This was the second part of the plants' ingenious solution to sur-
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vival on Mars. The windmills utilized the energy in the wind, and the plastic coating on the ground was in reality two thin sheets of plastic with a space between for water to circulate. The water was heated by the sun then pumped down to the permafrost, melting a little more of it each time.
"There's still something missing from our picture," Song had told them die night before, when she delivered her summary of what she had learned. "Marry hasn't been able to find a mechanism that would permit these things to grow by ingesting sand and rock and turning it into plasticlike materials. So we assume there is a reservoir of something like crude oil down there, maybe frozen in with the water."
"Where would that have come from?" Lang had asked.
"You've heard of the long-period Martian seasonal theories? Well, part of it is more than a theory. The combination of the Martian polar inclination, the precessional cycle, and the eccentricity of the orbit produces seasons that are about twelve thousand years long. We're in the middle of winter, though we landed in the nominal 'summer/ It's been theorized that if there were any Martian life it would have adapted to these longer cycles. It hibernates in spores during the cold cycle, when the water and carbon dioxide freeze out at the poles, then comes out when enough ice melts to permit biological processes. We seem to have fooled these plants; they thought summer was here when the water vapor content went up around the camp."
"So what about the crude?" Ralston asked. He didn't completely believe that part of the model they had evolved. He was a laboratory chemist, specializing in inorganic compounds. The way these plants produced plastics without high heat, through purely catalytic interactions, had him confused and defensive. He wished the crazy windmills would go away.
"I think I can answer that," McKUlian said. "These organisms barely scrape by in the best of times. The ones that have made it waste nothing. It stands to reason that any really ancient deposits of crude oil would have been exhausted in only a few of these cycles. So it must be that what we're thinking of as crude oil must be something a little different It has to be the remains of the last generation."
"But how did the remains get so far below ground?" Ralston asked. "You'd expect them to be high up. The winds couldn't bury them that deep in only twelve thousand years."
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"You're right," said McKUlian. "I don't really know. But I have a theory. Since these plants waste nothing, why not conserve then" bodies when they die? They sprouted from the ground; isn't it possible they could withdraw when things start to get tough again? They'd leave spores behind them as they retreated, distributing them all through the soil. That way, if the upper ones blew away or were sterilized by the ultraviolet, the ones just below them would still thrive when the right conditions returned. When they reached the permafrost, they'd decompose into this organic slush we've postulated, and. . . well, it does get a little involved, doesn't it?"
"Sounds all right to me," Lang assured her. "It'll do for a working theory. Now what about airborne spores?"
It turned out that they were safe from that imagined danger. There were spores in the air now, but they were not dangerous to the colonists. The plants attacked only certain kinds of plastics, and then only in certain stages of their lives. Since they were still changing, it bore watching, but the airlocks and suits were secure. The crew was enjoying the luxury of sleeping without their suits.
And there was much work to do. Most of the physical sort devolved on Crawford and, to some extent, on Lang. It threw them together a lot. The other three had to be free to pursue their researches, as it had been decided that only in knowing their environment would they stand a chance.
The two of them had managed to salvage most of the dome. Working with patching kits and lasers to cut the tough material, they had constructed a much smaller dome. They erected it on an outcropping of bare rock, rearranged the exhaust to prevent more condensation on the underside, and added more safety features. They now slept in a pressurized building inside the dome, and one of them stayed awake on watch at all times. In drills, they had come from a deep sleep to full pressure-integrity in thirty seconds. They were not going to get caught again.