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

Song had taken one apart as well as she could. She was still shaking her head in disbelief. She had
not been able to excavate the long insulated taproot, but she could infer how deep it went. It extended all
the way down to the layer of permafrost, twenty meters down.
 The ground between the windmills was coated in shimmering plastic. This was the second part of the
plants' ingenious solution to survival on Mars. The windmills utilized the energy in the wind, and the plastic
coating on the ground was in reality two thin sheets of plastic with a space between for water to circulate.
The water was heated by the sun then pumped down to the permafrost, melting a little more of it each
time.
"There's still something missing from our picture," Song had told them the night before, when she
delivered her summary of what she had learned. "Marry hasn't been able to find a mechanism that would
permit these things to grow by ingesting sand and rock and turning it into plastic-like materials. So we
assume there is a reservoir of something like crude oil down there, maybe frozen in with the water."
"Where would that have come from?" Lang had asked.
"You've heard of the long-period Martian seasonal theories? Well, part of it is more than a theory.
The combination of the Martian polar inclination, the precessional cycle, and the eccentricity of the orbit
produces seasons that are about twelve thousand years long. We're in the middle of winter, though we
landed in the nominal 'summer/ It's been theorized that if there were any Martian life it would have
adapted to these longer cycles. It hibernates in spores during the cold cycle, when the water and carbon
dioxide freeze out at the poles, then comes out when enough ice melts to permit biological processes. We
seem to have fooled these plants; they thought summer was here when the water vapor content went up
around the camp."
"So what about the crude?" Ralston asked. He didn't completely believe that part of the model they
had evolved. He was a laboratory chemist, specializing in inorganic compounds. The way these plants
produced plastics without high heat, through purely catalytic interactions, had him confused and
defensive. He wished the crazy windmills would go away.
"I think I can answer that," McKillian said. "These organisms barely scrape by in the best of times.
The ones that have made it waste nothing. It stands to reason that any really ancient deposits of crude oil
would have been exhausted in only a few of these cycles. So it must be that what we're thinking of as
crude oil must be something a little different It has to be the remains of the last generation."
"But how did the remains get so far below ground?" Ralston asked. "You'd expect them to be high
up. The winds couldn't bury them that deep in only twelve thousand years."
"You're right," said McKillian. "I don't really know. But I have a theory. Since these plants waste
nothing, why not conserve then" bodies when they die? They sprouted from the ground; isn't it possible
they could withdraw when things start to get tough again? They'd leave spores behind them as they
retreated, distributing them all through the soil. That way, if the upper ones blew away or were sterilized
by the ultraviolet, the ones just below them would still thrive when the right conditions returned. When
they reached the permafrost, they'd decompose into this organic slush we've postulated, and. . . well, it
does get a little involved, doesn't it?"
"Sounds all right to me," Lang assured her. "It'll do for a working theory. Now what about airborne
spores?"
It turned out that they were safe from that imagined danger. There were spores in the air now, but
they were not dangerous to the colonists. The plants attacked only certain kinds of plastics, and then only
in certain stages of their lives. Since they were still changing, it bore watching, but the airlocks and suits
were secure. The crew was enjoying the luxury of sleeping without their suits.
And there was much work to do. Most of the physical sort devolved on Crawford and, to some
extent, on Lang. It threw them together a lot. The other three had to be free to pursue their researches, as
it had been decided that only in knowing their environment would they stand a chance.
The two of them had managed to salvage most of the dome. Working with patching kits and lasers to
cut the tough material, they had constructed a much smaller dome. They erected it on an outcropping of
bare rock, rearranged the exhaust to prevent more condensation on the underside, and added more