"Philip Jose Farmer - Jesus on Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

their features. But they were human-sized and had two arms and two legs and
five fingers. Two of them lifted him up and half-carried him towards the big
wheeled machine. Danton's voice was yammering in his ear. 'What's going on,
Richard? Richard? Are you there?тАЩ
As he began to come to, he thought, You can see me, can't you? but he
did not reply for a minute. Then he mumbled, 'I'm okay. There's some things...
no... people... like people...'
He was shoved into the open door of the machine and set firmly down in a
chair. Something passed across his chest. A moment later, he knew that it was a
metal band that confined his arms.
Bronski was dragged in, struggling, and he was placed in a chair in front of
Orme. Past the rows of chairs were two chairs before a control board. The driver
and another person had to sit there. The big curving screen in front gave a 150-
degree view, allowing Orme to see what some of his captors were doing.
 He said, 'Madeleine, they're placing six metal strips across the doorway.
Now... they're putting six horizontal strips across the vertical. They seem to be
glued on. Now... they're gluing on a screen to the strips.'
The rover's arm was still sticking down through the hole. But it was a
figure seen in fog through the finely meshed screen.
'Now they're spraying something over the screen. What they're doing,
they're putting up a kind of temporary door, I think, so they can pump air back
into this section. Can you read me, Madeleine?'
There was no answer. The barrier was blocking off radio waves.
The workers returned to the rear of the machine where, he supposed, they
stored their tools in a compartment. Then they climbed in and took seats, the
door was shut, the machine turned around and headed towards the opposite
door. It sat for perhaps ten minutes, and suddenly the door swung open. The
machine rolled into another section just like the previous ones except that it had
overhead lights.
Orme thought that Nadir and Madeleine must be going crazy by now. And
on Earth, where the first photographs by the rover and the voice recordings
would be coming in, people would be in a frenzy. He said, 'God, let these...
people... be friendly. Let them also be Yours.'



3
Avram Bronski said, 'This may be the most luxurious prison cell in the solar
system.'
They were in a four-room apartment cut out of the rock high up on one
side of the immense cave. The walls were panelled with a light reddish-brown
wood-like material. The ceiling was stone but painted with murals depicting
scenes of domestic animals. No 'Martians' appeared in them nor were they
represented in the framed paintings on the walls. These paintings were either
abstract art, still life, or of buildings or creatures that either existed there or were
from mythology. Some looked like dragons; one was a whalelike seven-horned
beast bursting out of a sea.
Bronski, who had been doing some private speculating, had explained that
the law against representing any living creature in painting, sculpture, or in any
form whatsoever, had been modified. But he thought, if he were right, that it was