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

For Stafford it was different. There was the desert. His desert. The empty craters; the whistling chasms
whose fluted rocks sang faintly with the Martian wind, where you could get away from people. Here, you
could scream as loud as you liked and no one would come running. On Earth, there was no place left like
that; there was always some damned monitoring system or satellite....

Truth to tell, Stafford's desert jaunts had generated some notoriety and income that allowed him a few
luxuries beyond the frugal existence he had imagined for his late years in Mars City. The ice caves: he had
made money selling his holeos of the peculiar crystalline formations. An Earthside image hank had
marketed his famous close-up of lightning flashing among the dust devils. And a wealthy collector in L.A.
had paid well for the biggest crystal of specular hematite in the solar system. Who would have believed
anyone would be crazy enough to pay for shipping that one back! Some nouveau riche MacLaine, she
was, with money to burn and an idea that Martian crystals were even better than Earth crystals in terms
of aura or whatever the hell it was they talked about in their sad, upscale churches.

The income was nice, but the trouble with the notoriety was that people kept an eye on him, wondering
where he was off to next.

His wife, now gone, used to rail at him about the dangers. He saw it as no different from the pioneer
days on Earth. His grandfather had opened up new trails in the uranium fields of the Mexican desert,
traveling alone and risking death in 110-degree temperatures. He himself risked dying in тАФ 110-degree
temperatures. What was the difference? The eager Reaper strikes pretty fast when the temperatures go
two sigma beyond the green zone .

Anyway, he and his grandfather both had their common sense and their radios. And life always has an
element of danger, he thought with grim satisfaction.

Danger or not, life had been all right since he had retired from the new Mars rat race. Not "retired,"
really. Detachedhimself . Become independent. During his official career in BioExploration, he had failed
to achieve his goal, but he had failed magnificently enough to acquire clout.

Now the big balloon tires were throwing phantom minarets of powdered yellow limonite into the thin air
behind him. On the left was a distant orange cliff, soft in the haze-muted sun. Its base was undercut as if
dwarfs had carved out a shelter. He visualized erosion by the sting of saltating sand grains, driven by the
wind. Ahead to the left the horizon was broken by a crater rim three kilometers across, looking like the
scar left by an unseen hand that had punched its way out of the interior of Mars. Stafford glanced at the
orbiter photo pasted to the dashboard. Crater on the left. Check.

In spite of the fact that the buggy was a tiny beetle in the empty desert, Stafford had faith in it. The
redundant systems were reliable, and the cargo space between the EN-cells and the air processors was
loaded with extra airpacs and water.

Stafford still hadn't played his last card. Lately he had been going around telling his friends that there
were always more mysteries to discover, a little farther out in the desert. He had hinted he was on the
track of something unusual, out in Hellespontus, in the rim country northwest of Hellas Base. He had
arranged for his friend Carter to see him poring over the orbital photos. He had needed to plant certain
ideas in their minds, so they could reconstruct it later. He had needed to set the stage for his next
adventure.

It was amazing that he had ever talked his way into being allowed to take a buggy out on his own. But