"Whats It Like Out There by Edmond Hamilton" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

reported, but there might be anything here."
Miss Graham asked me, "Was that all there was, just
lichens?"
"That, and two or three kinds of queer cactus things," I
said. "And rock and sand. That's all."
As I read more of those little blue letters, I found that
now that Jim was gone I knew him better than I ever had.
There was something about him I'd never suspected. He
was romantic inside. We hadn't suspected it, he was always
so quiet and slow, but now I saw that all the time he was
more romantic about the thing we were doing than any of
us.
He hadn't let on. We'd have kidded him, if he had. Our
name for Mars, after we got sick of it, was the Hole. We
always talked about it as the Hole. I could see now that Jim
had been too shy of our kidding to ever let us know that he
glamorized the thing in his mind.
"This was the last one I got from him before his sickness,"
Miss Graham said.
That one said, "I'm starting north tomorrow with one of
the mapping expeditions. We'll travel over country no hu-
man has ever seen before."
I nodded. "I was on that party myself. Jim and I were on
the same half-track,"
"He was thrilled by it, wasn't he, Sergeant?"
I wondered. I remembered that trip, and it was hell. Our
job was simply to run a preliminary topographical survey,
checking with Geigers for possible uranium deposits.
It wouldn't have been so bad, if the sand hadn't started
to blow.
It wasn't sand like Earth sand. It was ground to dust by
billions of years of blowing around that dry world. It got
inside your breathing mask, and your goggles, and the en-
gines of the half-tracks, in your food and water and clothes.
There was nothing for three days but cold, and wind, and
sand.
Thrilled? I'd have laughed at that before. But now I didn't
know. Maybe Jim had been, at that. He had lots of pa-
tience, a lot more than I ever had. Maybe he glamorized
that hellish trip into wonderful adventure on a foreign
world.
"Sure, he was thrilled," I said. "We all were. Anybody
would be."
Miss Graham took the letters back, and then said, "You
had Martian sickness too, didn't you?"
I said, yes, I had, just a touch, and that was why I'd had
to spend a stretch in reconditioning hospital when I got
back.
She waited for me to go on, and I knew I had to. "They
don't know yet if it's some sort of virus or just the effect of