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

"Hello, hello, hello? No good on this one, Mary. Want me to try another channel?"
"Wait a moment. I can hear you. Where are you?"
"Hey, he hears me! Uh, that is, this is Song Sue Lee, and I'm right in front of you. If you look real
hard into the webbing, you can just make me out. FU wave my arms. See?"
Singh thought he saw some movement when he pressed his face to the translucent web. The web
resisted his hands, pushing back like an inflated balloon.
"I think I see you." The enormity of it was just striking him. He kept his voice under tight control, as
his officers rushed up around him, and managed not to stammer. "Are you well? Is there anything we can
do?"
There was a pause. "Well, now that you mention it, you might have come on time. But that's water
through the pipes, I guess. If you have some toys or something, it might be nice. The stories I've told little
Billy of all the nice things you people were going to bring! There's going to be no living with him, let me
tell you."
 This was getting out of band for Captain Singh.
"Ms. Song, how can we get in there with you?"
"Sorry. Go to your right about ten meters, where you see the steam coming from the web. There, see
it?" They did, and as they looked, a section of the webbing was pulled open and a rush of warm air
almost blew them over. Water condensed out of it in their faceplates, and suddenly they couldn't see very
well.
"Hurry, hurry, step in! We can't keep it open too long." They groped their way in, scraping frost
away with their hands. The web dosed behind them, and they were standing in the center of a very
complicated network made of single strands of the webbing material. Singh's pressure gauge read 30
millibars.
Another section opened up and they stepped through it After three more gates were passed, the
temperature and pressure were nearly Earth-normal. And they were standing beside a small oriental
woman with skin tanned almost black. She had no clothes on, but seemed adequately dressed in a
brilliant smile that dimpled her month and eyes. Her hair was streaked with gray. She would beтАФ Singh
stopped to considerтАФforty-one years old.
тАЬThis way," she said, beckoning them into a tunnel formed from more strips of plastic. They twisted
around through a random maze, going through more gates that opened when they neared them,
sometimes getting on their knees when the clearance lowered. They heard the sound of children's voices.
They reached what must have been the center of the maze and found the people everyone had given
up on. Eighteen of them. The children became very quiet and stared solemnly at the new arrivals, while
the other four adults. . .
The adults were standing separately around the space while tiny helicopters flew around them,
wrapping them from head to toe in strips of webbing like human maypoles.
"Of course we don't know if we would have made it without the assist from the Martians," Mary
Lang was saying, from her perch on an orange thing that might have been a toadstool. "Once we figured
out what was happening here in the graveyard, there was no need to explore alternative ways of getting
food, water, and oxygen. The need just never arose. We were provided for."
She raised her feet so a group of three gawking women from the ship could get by. They were letting
them come through in groups of five every hour. They didn't dare open the outer egress more often than
that, and Lang was wondering if it was too often. The place was crowded, and the kids were nervous.
But better to have the crew satisfy their curiosity in here where we can watch them, she reasoned, than
have them messing things up outside.
The inner nest was free-form. The New Amsterdamites had allowed it to stay pretty much the way
the whirlibirds had built it, only taking down an obstruction here and there to allow humans to move
around. It was a maze of gauzy walls and plastic struts, with clear plastic pipes running all over and
carrying fluids of pale blue, pink, gold, and wine. Metal spigots from the Podkayne had been inserted in
some of the pipes. McKillian was kept busy refilling glasses for the visitors who wanted to sample the