"James P. Hogan - Leapfrog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

Fail had come to the northern hemisphere of Mars. At the north
pole, the mean temperature had fallen to тАФ 125┬░ CтАФcold enough to freeze
carbon dioxide out of the thin Martian atmosphere and begin forming the
annual covering that would lay over the permanent cap of water-ice
until spring. In the southern polar regions, where winter had ended,
the carbon dioxide was evaporating. Along the edge of the retreating
fields of dry ice, strong winds were starting to raise dust. During the
short but hot southern summer, with Mars making its closest approach to
the sun, the resulting storms could envelop the planet.
Edmund Halloran watched the surface details creep across the
large wallscreen at one end of the mess area of Yellow Section, Deck B,
of the interplanetary transfer vessel Mikhail Gorbachev, wheeling in
orbit at the end of its six-month voyage from Earth to bring the third
manned mission to the Red Planet. The other new arrivals sitting around
him at the scratched and stained green-topped aluminum tablesтАФwhere
they had eaten their meals, played innumerable hands of cards, and
talked, laughed, and exchanged reminiscences through the long voyage
outтАФwere also strangely quiet as they took in the view. Unlike the
other views of Mars that they had studied and memorized, this was not
being replayed from transmissions sent back from somewhere on the other
side of millions of miles of space. This time it was really on the
outside of the thin metal shell around them. Very soon, now, they would
be leaving the snug cocoon with its reassuring routine and its company
of familiar faces that they had come to know as home, to go down there.
They had arrived.
The structure had lifted out from lunar orbit as a flotilla of
three separate, identical craft, independently powered, each fabricated
in
the general form of a T, but with the bar curved as part of the arc of
a circle, rather than straight. On entering the unpowered free-fall
phase that would endure for most of the voyage, the three ships had
maneuvered together and joined at their bases to become the equispaced
spokes of a rotating Y, creating comfortable living conditions in the
three inhabited zones at the extremities. The triplicated design meant
that in the event of a major failure in any of the modules, everybody
could get home again in the remaining twoтАФ~or at a push, with a lot of
overcrowding and at the cost of jettisoning everything not essential to
survival, even in a remaining one. The sections accommodated a total of
600 people, which represented a huge expansion of the existing
population of 230 accrued from the previous two missions. Some of the
existing population had been distributed between a main base on Lunae
Planum and a few outlying installations. The majority, however, were
still up in MARSIANSKAYA MEZHDUN-ARODNAYA ORBITAL тАШNAYA STANTSIYA, or
тАЬMars International Orbiting Station,тАЭ awaiting permanent accommodation
on the surface. In the Russian Cyrillic alphabet this was shortened to
MAPCMOC, yielding the satisfyingly descriptive transliteration MARSMOS
in English, which was accepted as the standard international language.
The region coming into view now was an area roughly twenty
degrees north of the equator. Halloran recognized the heavily cratered
area of Lunae Planum and the irregular escarpment at its eastern edge,