"Geoffrey A. Landis - The Man in the Mirror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

his off-shift hours, if he didnтАЩt want to. And so he slipped away, without
telling anybody.

The artifact was half a world away, far from the RamblinтАЩ WreckтАЩs
position near the ammonia deposits. He topped off his suit batteries and
then checked a snowcat out of the equipment depot. It was technically
theft, maybe, if you looked at it one way, since he wasnтАЩt actually on shift,
but it wasnтАЩt as if he wasnтАЩt going to return itтАФwhere could he possibly go?
He wasnтАЩt even using up fuel, since the snowcat had a little nuclear
generator that gave out a constant 14.3 kilowatts of power whether it was
being driven or not.

That had been his first mistake, going out alone. A few hours later, it
was beginning to look like it may have been a fatal one.

The drive was a thrill; a little under three hours at an average speed of
almost two hundred kilometers per hour. In the low gravity, the sled
bounced up on every little hummock of snow. The first hour he had steered
carefully to the smoothest paths, and the bumps had scared him nearly out
of his wits. But the sled had attitude control thrusters that kept it from
spilling over when it was airborne (or, technically, vacuum-borne, he
supposed, since the microbar pressure of mostly-helium surrounding
Sedna was nothing that could vaguely be given the nomenclature of air.)
After a while he realized the snow pack was so thick, it had smoothed out
the planetтАЩs hills into natural ski jumps, and he had gotten more and more
adventurous. Now he was picking jumps that gave him a hang time of five
seconds, ten, thirty.

A hell of a lot more fun than studying, he thought.

Viewed through his intensity-enhanced goggles, the landscape was
low rolling hummocks of a deep, dusky red, the color of Georgia mud.
Sedna was beautiful. Lee saw a landscape of soft hills lit by urgently brilliant
stars, speckled in colors: the glistening white of water-ice snow splashed
across through scars in the surface of red tholins. He tried switching the
image intensifier off. At first all he could see was darkness, and the sense
of speeding across darkness, trusting in the autopilot to avoid obstacles,
made his heart hammer. After a minute he began to make out the smudges
in the darkness, and in a few minutes more, even though the sun was
billions of miles away, he discovered that he could still see. Without the
image intensifier, the surface was colorless, a pale ghostly glistening in the
starlight, with the Sun so small he could have covered it with the head of a
pin.

It seemed more real to him this way, so he left the image intensifier
off. The heads-up display told him the topography, and the autopilot picked
out the smoothest path across the snow.

тАЬYou guys should have come with me,тАЭ he said, speaking to the
empty air. тАЬPokerтАЩs no fun, not until after payday, anyway.тАЭ