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

"Does that mean anything?"
She shrugged. "Who can tell? Probably not."
"Any steel fixtures hold pressure?"
Leah shook her head. "I checked the plans. No, all the iron and steel parts are
incidentals. No steel penetration of the pressure hull."
Tally came back from her scouting, and looked at us both. "You are working too
hard," she said. "It's time for a break. Way past time, you ask me. And I know
just the thing."
"What do you have in mind?" I asked.
"Here." She handed me a sheet of aluminum. It was about a meter long, slightly
curved, one side coated with a carbon composite facing. In a corner "117 Outer"
was written in Leah's neat printing. A panel from the outer skin of the exploded
habitat. A mounting flange with a hole for bolting interior fixtures was at one
end. She handed another one to Leah. "Sure you don't need these panels, now?"
she asked Leah.
"Already looked at them." Leah shook her head. "That was the side opposite the
explosion. Nothing but junk, now."
After we had suited up for outside and smeared one another's faces white with
sunblock, we each took a panel, and Tally led us up to the top of the ridge that
rose above the habitat. The hill surface was comprised of sand held in place
with a thin veneer of purple-brown algae, slick as powdered Teflon. We had to
choose our footing carefully to avoid skidding back down.
It was a gorgeous day. From the ridge, the marscape appeared striped, brown and
purple strips in alternation all the way to the horizon. The purple was the
algae, covering the sunnier face of each ridge; the brown anaerobic scum
colonizing the shadier back face. The characteristic north-south wind pattern
was clearly manifest in the form of long streaks trailing behind each of the
larger boulders. Today, though, the wind was once again slight, erratic light
gusts of no fixed direction.
We reached the top, and Tally smiled. She threaded a lanyard through the
bolthole on her aluminum sheet, dropped it on the ground, and put one foot on
it. "You might try this sitting down first," she said. Holding the lanyard in
one hand like a set of reins, she pushed off down the hill.
At first she didn't move very fast. As the sled gathered speed, each bump sent
it increasingly higher. Her balance seemed precarious, but in the one-third
normal gravity of Mars, she had plenty of time. As she leaned to control the
sled, her movements were a slow-motion ballet. We could hear her shout, muffled
by her rebreather, trailing behind her.
"Yahoo!"
I looked at Leah. She looked back at me, then shrugged. She dropped her sled on
the ground and pushed it with her toe, testing how well it slid over the scum.
Then she sat down on it, grasped the lanyard with both hands and pulled it taut,
and looked back over her shoulder. "Give me a push," she said.
It took a little more skill than Tally had let on, but after a few spills, we
got the hang of it, and organized scumsledding races. Tally on one sled and Leah
and me together on another, then Leah and Tally together, then finally all three
of us on one sled, Leah and I sitting docked together and Tally standing with
her knees gripping my chest from behind.
At a rest break, sitting exhausted from climbing, I said to Tally, "So this
means that you think there's no danger? I mean, nobody trying to kill us?"