"Geoffrey Landis - Ecopoiesis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

quit stumbling around."
And, later, after she'd taken off her clothes, she said, "Just don't think it
means something, okay? I couldn't stand that."
But it did. Maybe not to her, but to me.
And so we came to Mars. When the authorities had finally noticed that the
missing science team had stopped filing status reports to Spacewatch, and the
orbital eye they sent to report got a break in the heavy Martian cloud cover and
saw pieces of the habitat spread across ten kilometers of landscape-- a
"presumed fatal malfunction," as it was reported, Spacewatch had asked for Leah;
she had a rep for unraveling tough balls of fur, and I scrambled to rate the
slot to go along. Not that this was so hard; I had my skills, piloting and
mechanicing and, yes, troubleshooting, and most crews were glad to have me
aboard. In this investigation, the third slot on the team was special, in case
the accident we were investigating was no accident at all, and the perpetrators
might not be finished. The third slot needed a professional paranoid.
We both knew exactly the survival expert who was right for that place
"Still hanging 'round with that long-legged white girl, I see," Tally had
greeted me, when I came to ask if she wanted to join the team. "Give it up, boy,
she's too good for you."
"Don't I know it," I'd said.
But that was the past, and brooding over the past wasn't going to get me to bed,
or explain Leah Hamakawa to me. She had undressed without the least trace of
self consciousness and gotten into the cubby's tiny bed. I undressed, with a lot
more trepidation, and lay down beside her. She turned and watched me with a
pellucid gaze, free of any emotion I could interpret. She wouldn't let me
understand her, but for whatever reason of her own, she would let me love her.
For the moment, that would have to be enough.
#
The next day I worked on decoding the data from the damaged opticals, while Leah
put together the jigsaw puzzle of the exploded habitat pieces, and Tally ranged
in ever wider loops from the habitat, exploring. I succeeded in getting large
blocks of data, but nothing was of any evident value: lengthy descriptions of
bacteria, lists of bacteria count per square millimeter in a hundred different
habitats.
"Here's something," Leah said. "Take a look at my collection of pieces. What's
missing?"
I looked over the junk pile. Skin, electronics, window fragments, plastic
shards. "What?"
"Don't you see it? Aluminum, titanium, carbon-composite, plastic-- anything
missing here?"
Now that she had given the hint, I could see it, too. "Steel. Nothing out of
steel, or iron. Is that surprising? Steel's heavy." Hardly anything in a
space-going technology is made out of steel. In space, every extra gram is paid
for over and over again in fuel.
"There's not a lot of steel on a hab module," Leah said, "but there is some.
Look around our hab, not everything is made of the light metals. But, no steel
in the pieces here. And, take a look here." She chose a piece out of the pile
and handed it to me. It was a damaged recording unit. The capstan flopped loose
in the absence of the steel axle it should have rotated on. She handed me
another, a piece with a neat hole where a steel grommet should have fit.