"Geoffrey H. Landis - Falling onto Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

But he was one of the survivors, a skinny ratlike man, tough as old string and cunning as a snake.

My G-g-grandma Kayla was one of the original inhabitants of Mars, one of the crew of the science base
at Shalbatana, the international station that had been established on Mars long before anybody thought up
the idea to dump criminals on Mars. When the order came that the science station was to close, and that
they were to evacuate Mars, she chose to stay. Her science was more important, she told the magistrates
and people of Earth, than politics. She was studying the paleoclimate of Mars, trying to come to an
understanding of how the planet had dried and cooled, and how cycles of warming and cooling had
passed over the planet in long, slow waves. It was an understanding, she said, that was desperately
needed on the home planet.

Great-great-grandma Kayla, in her day, had earned a small measure of fame for being one of the
seventeen that stayed on Mars with the base at Shalbatana. That fame might have helped some. Their
radio broadcasts, as people fell out of the sky, nudged the governments of Earth to remember their
promises. Exile to Mars was notтАФor at least they had claimed it was notтАФintended as a death sentence.
The pleas of the refugees could easily be dismissed as exaggerations and lies, but Shalbatana had a radio,
and their vivid and detailed reports of the refugees had some effect.

The first few years supplies were sent from Earth, mostly from volunteer organizations: Baha'i relief
groups, Amnesty International, the holy sisters of Saint Paul. It wasn't enough.

After the first two waves, the scientists who stayed behind realized that they would have no more hope of
doing science. They greeted the prisoners as best they could, helped them in the deadly race of time to
build habitats, to start growing the plants that they would need to purify the air and survive.

Mars is a desert, a barren rock in space. There was no mercy in sending criminals to Mars instead of
sending them to death. They could learn quickly, or die. Most of them died. A few leaned: learned to
electrolyze the deep-buried groundwater to generate oxygen, learned to refine the raw materials to make
the tools to make the furnaces to reduce the alloys to make the machines to build the machines that
would allow them to live. But, as fast as they could build the machinery that might keep them alive, more
waves of desperate, dying prisoners poured down from the sky; more angry, violent men who thought
that they had nothing left to lose.

It was the sixth wave that wrecked the base. This was a stupid, self-destructive thing to do, but the men
were vicious, resentful, and dying. A generation later, they called themselves political refugees, but there
is little doubt that for the most part they were thugs and robbers and murderers. From the sixth wave
came a leader, a man who called himself Dingo. On Earth, he had machine-gunned a hundred people in
an apartment block that fell behind in paying him protection. On the ship, Dingo killed seven prisoners
with his bare hands, simply to make the point that he was going to be the leader.

Leader he was From fear or respect or pure anger, the prisoners on the ship followed him, and when
they fell onto Mars, he harassed them, lectured them, beat them, and forged them into an angry army.
They had been abandoned on Mars, Dingo told them, to die slowly. They could only survive if they
matched the Earth's brutality with their own. He marched them five hundred kilometers across the barren
sands to the Shalbatana habitat.

The habitat was taken before the inhabitants had even realized it was under attack. The scientists who
hadn't abandoned the station were beaten with scraps of metal from the vandalized habitat, blindfolded,
and held as hostages while the prisoners radioed the Earth with their demands. When the demands were
unanswered, the men were stripped and thrown naked out onto the sands to die. In rage and