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

petrochemical complex. It was a short plant that sprouted up half a meter, then extruded two stalks parallel to the ground. At the end of each stalk was a perfect globe, one gray, one blue. The blue one was much larger than the gray one.
Crawford looked at it briefly, then squatted down beside the rest, wondering what all the fuss was about Everyone looked very solemn, almost scared.
"You called me over to see this?"
Lang looked over at him, and something in her face made him nervous.
"Look at it, Matt. Really look at it." So he did, feeling foolish, wondering what the joke was. He noticed a white patch near the top of the largest globe. It was streaked, like a glass marble with swirls of opaque material hi it. It looked very familiar, he realized, with the hair on the back of his neck starting to stand up.
"It turns," Lang said quietly. "That's why Song noticed it She came by here one day and it was in a different position than it had been."
"Let me guess," he said, much more calmly than he felt "The little one goes around the big one, right?"
"Right. And the little one keeps one face turned to the big one. The big one rotates once in twenty-four hours. It has an axial tilt of twenty-three degrees."
"It's a ... what's the word? Orrery. It's an orrery." Crawford had to stand up and shake his head to clear it.
"It's funny," Lang said, quietly. "I always thought it would be something flashy, or at least obvious. An alien artifact mixed in with caveman bones, or a spaceship entering the system. I guess I was thinking hi terms of pottery shards and atom bombs."
"Well, that all sounds pretty ho-hum to me up against this," Song said. "Do you ... do you realize . . . what are we talking about here? Evolution, or ... or engineering? Is it the plants themselves that did this, or were they made to do it by whatever built them? Do you see what I'm talking about? I've felt funny about- those wheels for a long time. I just won't believe they'd evolve naturally."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean I think these plants we've been seeing were designed to be the way they are. They're too perfectly adapted, too ingenious to have just sprung up hi response to the environment" Her eyes seemed to
wander, and she stood up and gazed into the valley below them. It was as barren as anything that could be imagined: red and yellow and brown rock outcroppings and tumbled boulders. And in the foreground, the twirling colors of the whirligigs.
"But why this thing?" Crawford asked, pointing to the impossible artifact-plant. "Why a model of the Earth and Moon? And why right here, in the graveyard?"
"Because we were expected," Song said, still looking away from them. "They must have watched the Earth, during the last summer season. I don't know; maybe they even went there. If they did, they would have found men and women like us, hunting and living hi caves. Building fires, using clubs, chipping arrowheads. You know more about it than I do, Matt."
"Who are they?" Ralston asked. "You think we're going to be meeting some Martians? People? I don't see how. I don't believe it."
"I'm afraid I'm skeptical, too," Lang said. "Surely there must be some other way to explain it."
"No! There's no other way. Oh, not people like us, maybe. Maybe we're seeing them right now, spinning like crazy." They all looked uneasily at the whirligigs. "But I think they're not here yet I think we're going to see, over the next few years, increasing complexity in these plants and animals as they build up a biome here and get ready for the builders. Think about it. When summer comes, the conditions will be very different. The atmosphere will be almost as dense as ours, with about the same partial pressure of oxygen. By then, thousands of years from now, these early forms will have vanished. These things are adapted for low pressure, no oxygen, scarce water. The later ones will be adapted to an environment much tike ours. And that's when we'll see the makers, when the stage is properly set." She sounded almost religious when she said it.
Lang stood up and shook Song's shoulder. Song came slowly back to them and sat down, still blinded by a private vision. Crawford had a glimpse of it himself, and it scared him. And a glimpse of something else, something that could be important but kept eluding him.
"Don't you see?" she went on, calmer now. "It's too pat, too much of a coincidence. This thing is like a ... a headstone, a monument. It's growing right here in the graveyard, from the bodies of our friends. Can you believe in that as just a coincidence?"
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Evidently no one could. But likewise, Crawford could see no reason why it should have happened the way it did.
It was painful to leave the mystery for later, but there was nothing to be done about it. They could not bring themselves to uproot the thing, even when five more like it sprouted in the graveyard. There was a new consensus among them to leave the Martian plants and animals alone. Like nervous atheists, most of them didn't believe Song's theories but had an uneasy feeling of trespassing when they went through the gardens. They felt subconsciously that it might be better to leave them alone in case they turned out to be private property.
And for six months, nothing really new cropped up among the whirligigs. Song was not surprised. She said it supported her theory that these plants were there only as caretakers to prepare the way for the less hardy, air-breathing varities to come. They would warm the soil and bring the water closer to the surface, then disappear when their function was over.
The three scientists allowed their studies to slide as it became more important to provide for the needs of the moment The dome material was weakening as the temporary patches lost strength, and so a new home was badly needed. They were dealing daily with slow leaks, any of which could become a major blowout.
The Podkayne was lowered to the ground, and sadly decommissioned. It was a bad day for Mary Lang, the worst since the day of the blowout. She saw it as a necessary but infamous thing to do to a proud flying machine. She brooded about it for a week, becoming short-tempered and almost unapproachable. Then she asked Craw-ford to join her in the private shelter. It was the first time she had asked any of the other four. They lay in each other's arms for an hour, and Lang quietly sobbed on his chest. Crawford was proud that she had chosen him for her companion when she could no longer maintain her tough, competent show of strength. In a way, it was a strong thing to do, to expose weakness to the one person among the four who might possibly be her rival for leadership. He did not betray the trust. In the end, she was comforting him.
After that day Lang was ruthless in gutting the old Podkayne. She supervised the ripping out of the motors to provide more living space, and only Crawford saw what it was costing her. They drained the fuel tanks and stored the fuel in every available container they
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could scrounge. It would be useful later for heating, and for recharging batteries. They managed to convert plastic packing crates into fuel containers by lining them with sheets of the double-walled material the whirligigs used to heat water. They were nervous at this vandalism, but had no other choice. They kept looking nervously at the graveyard as they ripped up meter-square sheets of it.
They ended up with a long cylindrical home, divided into two small sleeping rooms, a community room, and a laboratory-storehouse-workshop in the old fuel tank. Crawford and Lang spent the first night together in the "penthouse," the former cockpit, the only room with windows.
Lying there wide awake on the rough mattress, side by side in the warm air with Mary Lang, whose black leg was a crooked line of shadow laying across his body, looking up through the port at the sharp, unwinking starsЧwith nothing done yet about the problems of oxygen, food, and water for the years ahead and no assurance he would live out the night on a planet determined to kill himЧCrawford realized he had never been happier in his life.
On a day exactly eight months after the disaster, two discoveries were made. One was in the whirligig garden and concerned a new plant that was bearing what might be fruit. They were clusters of grape-sized white balls, very hard and fairly heavy. The second discovery was made by Lucy McKillian and concerned the absence of an event that up to that time had been as regular as the full moon.
*Tm pregnant," she announced to them that night, causing Song to delay her examination of the white fruit.
It was not unexpected; Lang had been waiting for it to happen since the night the Burroughs left. But she had not worried about it Now she must decide what to do.
"I was afraid that might happen," Crawford said. "What do we do, Mary?"
"Why don't you tell me what you think? You're the survival expert. Are babies a plus or a minus in our situation?"
"I'm afraid I-have to say they're a liability. Lucy will be needing extra food during her pregnancy, and afterward, and it will be an extra mouth to feed. We can't afford the strain on our resources." Lang said nothing, waiting to hear from McKillian.
"Now wait a minute. What about all this line about 'colonists'
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you've been feeding us ever since we got stranded here? Who ever heard of a colony without babies? If we don't grow, we stagnate, right? We have to have children." She looked back and forth from Lang to Crawford, her face expressing formless doubts.
"We're in special circumstances, Lucy," Crawford explained. "Sure, I'd be all for it if we were better off. But we can't be sure we can even provide for ourselves, much less a child. I say we can't afford children until we're established."
"Do you want the child, Lucy?" Lang asked quietly.
McKillian didn't seem to know what she wanted. "No. I... but, yes. Yes, I guess I do." She looked at them, pleading for them to understand.
"Look, I've never had one, and never planned to. I'm thirty-four years old and never, never felt the lack. I've always wanted to go places, and you can't with a baby. But I never planned to become a colonist on Mars, either. I... things have changed, don't you see? I've been depressed." She looked around, and Song and Ralston were nodding sympathetically. Relieved to see that she was not the only one feeling the oppression, she went on, more strongly. "I think if I go another day like yesterday and the day beforeЧand todayЧI'll end up screaming. It seems so pointless, collecting all that information, for what?"
"I agree with Lucy," Ralston said, surprisingly. Crawford had thought he would be the only one immune to the inevitable despair of the castaway. Ralston in his laboratory was the picture of carefree detachment, existing only to observe.
"So do I," Lang said, ending the discussion. But she explained her reasons to them.