"William K. Hartmann - Mars Underground" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hartmann William K)

They were a long way from anything, Stafford and his dune buggy. Alone. Five thousand klicks from
Mars City. Three-fifty from little Hellas Base, hotbed of desert dreams. There was no road. There had
been no road for more than a day.

Virgin territory, Stafford noted to himself. Well, it wasn't the first time. Old Man of the Desert, they
called him. Not for nothing. He looked at the forbidding, unblemished vista. The smile was still on his lips.

The blue buggy churned on toward ... something. Squinting, Stafford pushed his square, weathered face
forward against the front window, feeling his thick white hair and even his white mustache bristle against
the glass. It was as if he were trying to be out there, to be part of the landscape. The thing he was
searching for would be up ahead, somewhere. He didn't know what it would turn out to be, but he knew
it was there, and he had his suspicions.

When he first started out from Hellas Base on Thursday, he surprised himself by spending as much time
looking out the back window as the front, watching for possible pursuers. This unexpected reaction
intrigued him. Paranoia? Guilt setting in? Still, he knew that people were interested in his actions. The
young engineers and scientists gossiped about him. "So where's Old Man Stafford off to this time?" It
was like the Old West: when a grizzled prospector set out purposefully into the hills, the rumor-mongers
said he was after some secret treasure. Well, this time they were right. Doubly so. Soon they would learn
how right they were.

By virtue of nothing more than the clock's steadfast ticking, Stafford had become one of the seniors in a
rusty world of young technicians.

Martians, they werepleased to call themselves. Well, Stafford had the best claim to the title. Old Man
Stafford, the desert rat, the codger, who spent his retirement searching for ... well ... things. "Wonderful
things." As a boy, back in California, Stafford read about Howard Carter's words when the archaeologist
first peered into King Tut's tomb. "What do you see?" his team asked him. "Wonderful things," he said. It
applied to Mars, Stafford thought.

He peered through the dust-streaked glass. Ahead, to the west, a backlit haze of dust reduced distant,
eroded mesas to pale fantasy castles. They did not shimmer. The air was too thin and too cold. The
castles stood, stolid and still, two-dimensional in the luminous haze. Far cry from the Berkeley cafes and
the last redwood forests, old man. To a lot of the farmers, watching holeo images in their worn armchairs
Earthside, Mars seemed only a landscape of desolation. Red rocks, black rocks, and dust. To Stafford,
it was a new world full of Wonderful Things. Interesting oddities. Martian El Dorados. The things desert
rats had sought for a thousand years.
The spartan horizon ahead was a clean, pale line that no one had ever crossed.

It's always folks from green and wet places like northern California who end up loving the desert, he
mused. Lawrence out of Oxford. Van Dyke out of New Jersey or someplace.

Well let them call him what they wanted. In his twenty-one years on Mars he had had his fill of the
Engineering Corps, the Agriculture Experiment Stations, the Clarke Project,the hundred other
progressive projects of the clean, keen greenhorns who kept pouring into Mars City, intent on bringing it
above what they called "critical mass." Critical mass for survivalтАФthat's what they were talking about.
The minimum population and supporting equipment to make a self-sustaining colony. Critical mass was a
shiny, polished concept from the gray halls of the universities and space agencies on Earth, but it had its
dark sideтАФa side discussed only in hushed conversations among the planners who hung out during late
hours in what passed for dim bars in Mars City: they would have to reach critical mass before they could