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

survive a catastrophic shutdown of the supply lines from EarthтАФa shutdown that could happen any day
because of an economic collapse Earthside, a spacecraft disaster at Crystal City or Phobos, or worse.
Ordinary Martians laughed it off. But some of the planners thought it might happen. Look what had
happened already in Kazakhstan and Lima.

Stafford's opinion of Earth was that no disaster was too unlikely to contemplate, given the way things
terrestrial were going. The farmers, as Martians called them, had a truly Ptolemaic lack of imagination:
they still thought of Earth as the center of the solar system. Rich, ravaged, unheedful Earth.

Stafford was all for Martian self-sufficiencyтАФanexciting goalтАФbut he grew more and more disillusioned
with the way the greenhorns and uncivil engineers were bent on transforming the rusty old planet not into
a newMars, but into a streamlined suburb of Earth, full of transplanted farmers and mall people.

The thing of it was,no one knew how many people and machines it would take to reach critical mass on
Mars. Some experts said a population of three thousand, plus nuclear generators, soil processors. Others
said five or ten thousand, plus redundant infrastructure; the whole urban mess. For every Ph.D., an equal
and opposite Ph.D.

Martians hoped the present population was enough. Three thousand peopleтАФputting Mars City
somewhere in limbo between aresearch out-post and a functioning town. Six thousand Martians in all, if
you counted Phobos, Hellas, and the Polar Station. Too many for Stafford. The old days of basic,
mission-driven exploration had ended. Politics was starting to rear its ugly head. You found yourself
doing something because someone said so, not because it had to be done.

He glanced all around the horizon again. Nothing yet. He craned his neck to peer out the back window.
Nothing behind either. The desert was empty. "Clean" was the word Lawrence had used in Arabia.



Hours later, the blue beetle was still crawling along. In the north, the summer sun had crossed the
meridian and was sinking toward the west. Afternoon. It ought to be hot. Of course, it wasn't. Stafford
didn't let himself think about how cold the air was outside.

He spotted something ahead projecting above the sand. It was dark-colored, not bright as he'd
anticipated. He drove closer.

It turned out to be only a curious rock formation, sticking up like an African anthill. It looked to be some
odd-shaped boulder, exhumed by the winds, sculpted and undercut by the blowing sand. As he drove
by, he foresaw that in another thousand years it would be gone.

Once upon a time, his heart had beat fast every time he saw an odd exposure of old rock. They were
windows into the past. When he first came to Mars, he had been seeking his own holy grail. He had
wanted to be the one to confirm the widespread theory that life had evolved far beyond the measly
microbes that had been reportedтАФon again, off againтАФsince the turn of the century. Given the clement
conditions geologists had established for the earliest phase of Martian history, it should have been true.
From the work of Krennikov and Boikova, it seemed a small step to conclude that once life got started,
it had a thousand non-convergent paths to followтАФdifferent paths in each environment, on each clement
planet. Long ago, during the mysteriously moist early millennia of the planet, when the air was thick and
water ran on the surface, Martian RNA and DNA should have gone off in directions never seen on
Earth. He, Stafford, would be the one to find the evidence.