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

But the area around here was free of any impact craters, small or large. And it
seemed too much of a coincidence that a rare meteorite should happen to strike
this very narrow area and reveal what would otherwise never have been
discovered.
Orme steadied the beam on the orange characters in the dull black door.
Tau Omega in majuscule writing. But had they been made by one versed in
Greek? Were not the letters so simple that they would have been used by other
sentients? T and тДж would naturally occur to anyone who was originating an
alphabet. If indeed these characters were alphabetical. They could just as easily
be letters in a syllabary, or in an ideogrammatic system such as the Chinese,
used. They could also be arithmetical symbols.
Orme gestured to Bronski to go, down the ladder. If he wasn't to be the
first man to step on to Mars, he at least could be the first to touch the door in the
tunnel.
The rover was on the edge of the opening now, one scanner on Orme and
the other following the Frenchman. When Orme saw that Bronski was off the
ladder, he dropped the box to him. Bronski caught it easily, and Orme went down
the ladder.
Bronski had climbed up the small pile of rocks and was examining the
door by the time Orme reached him. Orme picked up a stone about the size of
his head and heaved it up and out of the tunnel, first making sure that the rover
wouldn't be struck by it. Bronski came down from the top of the pile to help him.
In about five minutes the way to the door was cleared. In the light of the four-
legged lamp, which had been set on the floor, Bronski removed the box from the
cylinder on Orme's back. The tests revealed that the door was of a steel alloy.
'It's set within the opening very tightly,' Orme said. 'Obviously, it's an air-
pressure seal, designed for just what happened, the collapse of a section of
tunnel.'
Unlike the shell of the supposed spaceship, the door was thick. There was
no hollow echo when he hit it with the hammer.
'We could try to blow it out,' Orme said. 'But I think it'll be easier of we go
to the roof of the next section and dig down.'
They got out of the tunnel and returned to the lander. Orme was beginning
to get tired, which meant that Bronski should be even more fatigued. Orme was
only five feet eight, but he weighed a muscular 190 pounds on Earth, with no
excess fat. The slender Bronski was quick, but he could not keep up with his
captain.
Orme suggested that they eat while taking a rest and perhaps even grab a
nap. The Frenchman refused.
'I'm still too keyed up.'
Carter, however, from his command post in Houston, ordered that they
attach the monitors. After reading the indicators, he said, 'You guys will have to
recharge your batteries. You're really tired.'
By the time the message came through, they had eaten. For an hour they
rested in their reclined seats. Orme used alpha-wave techniques to get to sleep.
Even so, it took twenty minutes, according to the monitors, before he
succumbed. He would have sworn that he'd been awake the entire period.
Twenty minutes later, they were back at the tunnel site. Eighteen inches
beyond the door, Orme cut a hole into the tunnel roof with a small laser-tipped
drill. When it broke through, the explosion of enclosed air drove the tool up out of