"Philip Jose Farmer - The Book of Philip Jose Farmer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

Stroyansky chuckled. Then he barked like a seal. "The success of the
expedition is more important than the fate of four men. Theoretically, anyway. But if
I were in your shoes, and I'm glad I'm not, I would do the same. So, good luck, Lane."
"Thanks," said Lane. "I'll need more than luck. I'll also need God's help. I
suppose He's here, even if the place does look God forsaken."
He looked through the transparent double plastic walls of the dome.
"The wind's blowing about twenty-five miles an hour. The dust is covering the
tractor tracks. I have to get going before they're covered up entirely. My supplies are
all packed; I've enough food, air, and water to last me six days. It makes a big
package, the air tanks and the sleeping tent bulk large. It's over a hundred Earth
pounds, but here only about forty. I'm also taking a rope, a knife, a pickax, a flare
pistol, half a dozen flares. And a walkie-talkie.
"It should take me two days to walk the thirty miles to the spot where the tracs
last reported. Two days to look around. Two days to get back."
 "You be back in five days!" shouted Stroyansky. "That's an order! It shouldn't
take you more than one day to scout around. Don't take chances. Five days!"
And then, in a softer voice, "Good luck, and, if there is a God, may He help
you!"
Lane tried to think of things to say, things that might perhaps go down with
the Doctor Livingstone, I presume, category. But all he could say was, "So long."
Twenty minutes later, he closed behind him the door to the dome's pressure
lock. He strapped on the towering pack and began to walk. But when he was about
fifty yards from the base, he felt compelled to turn around for one long look at what
he might never see again. There, on the yellow-red felsite plain, stood the pressurized
bubble that was to have been the home of the five men for a year. Nearby squatted the
glider that had brought them down, its enormous wings spreading far, its skids
covered with the forever-blowing dust.
Straight ahead of him was the rocket, standing on its fins, pointing toward the
blue-black sky, glittering in the Martian sun, shining with promise of power, escape
from Mars, and return to the orbital ship. It had come down to the surface of Mars on
the back of the glider in a hundred-and-twenty-mile an hour landing. After it had
dropped the two six-ton caterpillar tractors it carried, it had been pulled off the glider
and tilted on end by winches pulled by those very tractors. Now it waited for him and
for the other four men.
"I'll be back," he murmured to it. "And if I have to, I'll take you up by myself."
He began to walk, following the broad double tracks left by the tank. The
tracks were faint, for they were two days old, and the blowing silicate dust had almost
filled them. The tracks made by the first tank, which had left three days ago, were
completely hidden.
The trail led northwest. It left the three-mile wide plain between two hills of
naked rock and entered the quarter-mile corridor between two rows of vegetation. The
rows ran straight and parallel from horizon to horizon, for miles behind him and miles
ahead.
Lane, on the ground and close to one row, saw it for what it was. Its
foundation was an endless three-foot high tube, most of whose bulk, like an iceberg's,
lay buried in the ground. The curving sides were covered with blue-green lichenoids
that grew on every rock or projection. From the spine of the tube, separated at regular
intervals, grew the trunks of plants. The trunks were smooth shiny blue-green pillars
two feet thick and six feet high. Out of their tops spread radially many pencil-thin
branches, like bats' fingers. Between the fingers stretched a blue-green membrane, the