"Edward L. Ferman - Best From F&SF, 23rd Edition" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ferman Edward L)

"Or die trying." He grinned at her. She at least had grasped the essence of the situation. Whether
survival was possible or not, it was necessary to maintain the illusion that it was. Otherwise, you might as
well cut your throat. You might as well not even be born, because life is an inevitably fatal struggle to
survive.
"What about air?" McKillian asked, still unconvinced.
"I don't know," he told her cheerfully. "It's a tough problem, isn't it?"
"What about water?"
"Well, down in that valley there's a layer of permafrost about twenty meters down."
She laughed. "Wonderful. So that's what you want us to do? Dig down there and warm the ice with
our pink little hands? It won't work, I tell you."
Crawford waited until she had run through a long list of reasons why they were doomed. Most of
them made a great deal of sense. When she was through, he spoke softly.
"Lucy, listen to yourself."
"I'm just-"
"You're arguing on the side of death. Do you want to die? Are you so determined that you won't
listen to someone who says you can live?"
She was quiet for a long time, then shuffled her feet awkwardly. She glanced at him, then at Song and
Ralston. They were waiting, and she had to blush and smile slowly at them.
"You're right. What do we do first?"
"Just what we were doing. Taking stock of our situation. We need to make a list of what's available
to us. We'll write it down on paper, but I can give you a general rundown." He counted off the points on
his fingers.
"One, we have food for twenty people for three months. That conies to about a year for the five of
us. With rationing, maybe a year and a half. That's assuming all the supply capsules reach us all right. In
addition, the Edgar is going to clean the pantry to the bone and give us everything they can possibly spare
and send it to us in the three spare capsules. That might come to two years or even three.
"Two, we have enough water to last us forever if the recyclers keep going. That'll be a problem,
because our reactor will run out of power in two years. We'll need another power source, and maybe
another water source.
"The oxygen problem is about the same. Two years at the outside.
We'll have to find a way to conserve it a lot more than we're doing. Offhand, I don't know how.
Song, do you have any ideas?"
She looked thoughtful, which produced two vertical punctuation marks between her slanted eyes.
"Possibly a culture of plants from the Edgar. If we could rig some way to grow plants in Martian
sunlight and not have them killed by the ultraviolet. . . ."
McKillian looked horrified, as any good ecologist would.
"What about contamination?" she asked. "What do you think that sterilization was for before we
landed? Do you want to louse up the entire ecological balance of Mars? No one would ever be sure if
samples in the future were real Martian plants or mutated Earth stock."
"What ecological balance?" Song shot back. "You know as well as I do that this trip has been nearly
a zero. A few anaerobic bacteria, a patch of lichen, both barely distinguishable from Earth formsтАФ"
"That's just what I mean. You import Earth forms now, and we'll never tell the difference."
"But it could be done, right? With the proper shielding so the plants won't be wiped out before they
ever sprout, we could have a hydroponics plant functioningтАФ"
"Oh, yes, it could be done. I can see three or four dodges right now. But you're not addressing the
main question, which isтАФ"
"Hold it," Crawford said. "I just wanted to know if you had any ideas." He was secretly pleased at
the argument; it got them both thinking along the right lines, moved them from the deadly apathy they
must guard against.
 "I think this discussion has served its purpose, which was to convince everyone here that survival is