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

It looked just like part of the regolith, so I overlooked it the first time."
"In just a year?" I asked. "Isn't that kinda fast?"
Leah shrugged. "Seems fast to me, too, but don't forget the UV. The surface here
is more reactive than we're used to."
I worked on deciphering their electronic records. They hadn't kept personal
logs, or perhaps if they had, they were on some optical I hadn't found yet. The
opticals I had were mostly data, with occasional notes about where or how the
samples were collected. By afternoon I had enough to determine when the last
data had been recorded, and could at least put a date to the disaster.
"Sometime on August tenth," I told Leah. "Two years ago."
"Really," Leah said. "That's interesting."
"Interesting?" I said. "Not really. But you asked me for a date."
"No, but it is interesting," Leah said. "Today is June 23rd."
"So?"
"That's Earth reckoning, of course. The Mars year is 687 Earth days long-- one
year, ten months and a few weeks. So, in Mars reckoning, it's nearly the first
anniversary of the disaster. Five days from now, in fact."
"Spooky," I said.
"No, I wouldn't call it spooky," she said. "But it is an odd coincidence."
I marked it on the calender.
I liked working alone with Leah, with Tally outside on patrol. I didn't exactly
resent Tally, but I did sometimes envy her effortless camaraderie with Leah. I
welcomed the chance to be alone with her, even though, for the most part, we
worked in silence.
"Tinkerman," Leah said.
"Yes?"
"Once you start getting the data you've recovered indexed, do a search on
weather for me."
I shrugged. "No problem." I looked at her. "You think it's relevant to the
investigation?"
She shook her head. "Just curious."
They had, I discovered, not taken detailed observations of the Martian weather.
But occasionally there was a mention of conditions outside. Their own experience
mirrored ours. About the same time in the Martian year, the overcast had
cleared, and a steady wind had arisen out of the north. The day before the
disaster, data had been marked with a note that samples from two sites had been
missed; the wind had blown away the stakes marking the site locations.
On another optical I found satellite photos of Mars. I looked at these with
interest. The weather clearing we'd seen wasn't local to the Syrtisian saddle;
the photos showed the northern hemisphere completely obscured by cloud cover,
and then a sudden clearing across the entire hemisphere. The view must have been
an infrared falsecolor, since the ocean was white and the land areas, in
contrast, looked nearly black. I checked the dates on the photos, and converted
them in my head into Martian season. The clearing started at just about the end
of northern hemisphere spring.
Leah nodded when I showed her what I'd recovered. She'd already radioed up to
ask Langevin for orbital photographs, and he'd confirmed that the clearing of
the clouds we'd seen was ubiquitous, starting with breaks in the cloud cover at
northern mid-latitudes, then slowly spreading south. "Apparently it's a seasonal
thing."