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

noticed it until Lackley, the Australian, had had his 'hunch'.
Or, perhaps, some beings had started to remove the rocks and something
had interrupted their work.
At this thought, a chill ran up his spine and over his scalp. Involuntarily, he
turned around to look behind him. There was, of course, no group of Martians
advancing silently towards him. He laughed.
'What's so funny?' Bronski said.
'Nothing in particular. I laughed because... it doesn't matter. Joy, maybe.
Here. Get the kit out.'
He turned his back to Bronski, who removed a box from the cylinder on it.
This was a minilaboratory designed for making chemical-physical tests. Bronski
put the box on the ground, opened the lid, and he and Orme went through the
process with a swiftness owing to long training. When they were done, Orme
gave his report.
'The door looks like metal. As you heard through the audiometer, the
interior is hollow. It rings when hit with a steel hammer. Even a diamond won't
scratch it. Nitric acid leaves it unmarked. I don't want to use a laser beam on it
because air might damage the contents. Providing there are any. Whatever
material it's made of, it's unknown to Terrestrial science.'
Bronski replaced the box in the cylinder, and they walked back to the
Barsoom. The cement was hard. In this atmosphere, where the pressure was
equal to that ten miles above Earth's surface, the moisture quickly left the
cement. It had boiled off in a vapour invisible in this twilight.
Orme used a tiny jack to draw up the slack and make the cable taut. Now
even a 250-mile-an-hour wind, which wasn't likely at the canyon bottom, would
not be able to push the lander over.
Nadir Shirazi, who was spelling Danton now, said, 'How do you two feel?
Do you want to rest before you go to the tunnel?'
'I'm too excited to stop now,' Bronski said. 'I'd like to push on.'
From the compartment which had held the anchoring material, they
removed a telescoping aluminium ladder and a box of explosives. Orme carrying
the box, they walked to the edge of the tunnel. The rover followed them, its main
scanner keeping them in view for the two in the Aries and the billions of people
on Earth. Orme put the box down and opened its lid. Bronski lowered the ladder
down into the tunnel. With a powerful lamp he'd taken from the box, Orme played
a beam of light along the tunnel. At the left side of the two men, the rover
followed the light with its antennas.
Orme had seen the interior of the opening many times by courtesy of the
rover. But now that he was seeing it with his own eyes, he felt the same thrill as
when he'd first witnessed it in the Houston laboratory. At the far end was a mass
of rock, pieces of the fallen roof. These presumably covered another door. Along
the length of the floor were other stone chunks, large and small. At the other end
was the upper part of a door, its lower quarter behind more pieces of rock. Red
dust covered the rocks. But its thinness indicated the roof had caved in recently.
What had caused the collapse? No one had a theory which could hold up
under any rationalisation. The tunnel was too tar away from the nearest cliff for
any rocks to have fallen on it. Anyway, there were no large rocks inside the
tunnel or near it. To the west were some huge boulders, but these had been
trundled down the canyon floor by water in some very remote past.
One scientist had proposed that a small meteorite had shattered the roof.