"Stanislaw Lem - Eden" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

The tunnel opened up unexpectedly. The soil had been getting drier and less compact for a while
now, and though the Physicist had noted this, the others did not agree: the soil they carried into the ship
seemed to them no different. The Engineer and the Captain, beginning their shift, had just taken up the
tools still warm from previous hands, and were hacking at the irregular wall, when a section suddenly
disappeared and air poured in through the opening. They could feel the draft: the pressure of the
atmosphere outside was a little higher than in the tunnel or the rocket. The hoes and steel poles worked
feverishly. No one any longer carried away the soil. The rest of the crew, unable to help those in front
because there was no room, formed a tight group at the rear. After a few final blows, the Engineer was
about to crawl outside, but the Captain stopped him. The Captain wanted to widen the exit first. He also
gave orders for the last chunks of soil to be carried into the ship, so that nothing would obstruct the
tunnel. Another ten or twenty minutes passed, therefore, before the six men crawled out onto the planet's
surface.



II
 It was dusk. The tunnel opened near the base of a gently sloping knoll about forty feet high.
Beyond, a vast plain stretched to the horizon, over which the first stars twinkled. There were vague,
slender treelike forms in the distance, but the light of the setting sun was now so dim that everything
merged into a uniform gray. The men stood silently. To their left, the huge hull of the ship jutted at an
angle into the air. One hundred twenty of its two hundred feet, the Engineer estimated, were embedded in
the knoll. But no one was interested any more in the silhouette of the tube ending in useless vanes and
exhaust cones. The men inhaled the cool air, with its faint, unfamiliar odor that no one could give a name
to, and a strong feeling of helplessness came over them. The hoes and pipes dropped from their hands.
They stood gazing at the plain, its horizons in darkness, and at the stars shining overhead.
"The Pole Star?" the Chemist asked in a hushed voice, pointing to a low star flickering in the east.
"It wouldn't be visible from here. We're now. . . yes, we're directly under the Galactic South
Pole. The Southern Cross ought to be over there somewhere. . ."
They craned their necks. The black sky was bright with constellations. The men pointed them out
to one another, naming them. This raised their spirits for a while. The stars were the only things familiar on
the empty plain.
"It's getting colder, like the desert," said the Captain.
"We'll accomplish nothing today. We'd better go back inside."
"What, back in that grave?" the Cyberneticist exclaimed, indignant.
"Without that grave we'd perish in two days here," the Captain said. "Don't be childish." He
turned around, walked steadily to the opening, which was barely visible from several feet higher on the
slope, lowered his legs, and pulled himself inside. For a moment his head was still visible; then it
disappeared. The others looked at one another.
"Come on," muttered the Physicist. They followed him reluctantly.
As they began crawling into the narrow opening, the Engineer said to the Cyberneticist, who was
last in line, "Did you notice the smell in the air?"
"Yes. Strange, pungent. . . Do you know its composition?"
"Like Earth's, with something added, I forget what. Nothing harmful. The data are in a small
green volume on the second shelf in the --" Then he remembered that he himself had filled the library with
soil. "Damn," he said, and squeezed himself through the hole.
The Cyberneticist, now alone, suddenly felt uneasy. It wasn't fear but an overwhelming sense of
being lost, of the strangeness of the landscape. And, too, there was something humiliating, he thought,
about returning to the ground like worms. He ducked his head and crawled into the tunnel behind the
Engineer.
The following day, some of the men wanted to carry their rations to the surface and have