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

was ingeniously contrived so he could unflap the rear section and expose the
necessary area without losing air or pressure from the rest of his suit. Naturally, there
was no thought of tempting the teeth of the Martian night. Sixty seconds at midnight
were enough to get a severe frostbite where one sat down.
Lane slept until half an hour after dawn, ate, deflated the tent, folded it,
stowed it, the battery, heater, food-box, and folding chair into his pack, threw away
the plastic sack, shouldered the pack, and resumed his walk.
By noon the tracks faded out completely. It made little difference, for there
was only one route the tanks could have taken. That was the corridor between the
tubes and the trees. Now he saw what the two tanks had reported. The trees on his
right began to look dead. The trunks and leaves were brown, and the ribs drooped.
He began walking faster, his heart beating hard. An hour passed, and still the
line of dead trees stretched as far as he could see.
"It must be about here," he said out loud to himself.
Then he stopped. Ahead was an obstacle.
It was the tube of which Greenberg had spoken, the one that ran at right angles
to the other two and joined them.
Lane looked at it and thought that he could still hear Greenberg's despairing
cry.
That thought seemed to turn a valve in him so that the immense pressure of
loneliness, which he had succeeded in holding back until then, flooded in. The blue-
black of the sky became the blackness and infinity of space itself, and he was a speck
of flesh in an immensity as large as Earth's land area, a speck that knew no more of
this world than a newborn baby knows of his.
Tiny and helpless, like a baby. . .
No, he murmured to himself, not a baby. Tiny, yes. Helpless, no. Baby, no. I
am a man, a man, an Earthman --
Earthman: Cardigan Lane. Citizen of the U.S.A. Born in Hawaii, the fiftieth
state. Of mingled German, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, Negro, Cherokee, Polynesian,
Portuguese, Russian-Jewish, Irish, Scotch, Norwegian, Finnish, Czech, English, and
Welsh ancestry. Thirty-one years old. Five foot six. One hundred and sixty pounds.
Brown-haired. Blue-eyed, Hawk-featured, M.D. and Ph.D. Married. Childless.
Methodist. Sociable mesomorphic mesovert. Radio ham. Dog breeder. Deer hunter.
Skin diver. Writer of first-rate but far from great poetry. All contained in his skin and
his pressure suit, plus a love of companionship and life, an intense curiosity, and a
courage. And now very much afraid of losing everything except his loneliness.
For some time he stood like a statue before the three-foot high wall of the
tube. Finally, he shook his head violently, shook off his fear like a dog shaking off
water. Lightly, despite the towering pack on his back, he leaped up onto the top of the
tube and looked on the other side, though there was nothing he had not seen before
jumping.
The view before him differed from the one behind in only one respect. This
was the number of small plants that covered the ground. Or rather, he thought, after
taking a second look, he had never seen these plants this size before. They were foot-
high replicas of the huge umbrella trees that sprouted from the tubes. And they were
not scattered at random, as might have been expected if they had grown from seeds
blown by the wind. Instead, they grew in regular rows, the edges of the plants in one
row separated from the other by about two feet.
His heart beat even faster. Such spacing must mean they were planted by
intelligent life. Yet intelligent life seemed very improbable, given the Martian