"Crucifixus Etiam" - читать интересную книгу автора (Miller Walter M)

The convoy rolled for three days towards the mountains, stopping at night to make camp, and driving on at sunrise. When they reached the first slopes of the foothills, the convoy stopped again. The deserted encampment lay a hundred and fifty miles behind. The going had been slow over the roadless desert.
"Everybody out!" barked the messenger from the lead truck. "Bail out! Assemble at the foot of the hill."
Voices were growling among themselves as the men moved in small groups from the trucks and collected in a milling tide in a shallow basin, overlooked by a low cliff and a hill. Manue saw the staff climb out of a cab and slowly work their way up the cliff. They carried a portable public address system.
"Gonna get a preaching," somebody snarled.
"Sit down, please!" barked the loud-speaker. "You men sit down there! QuietЧquiet, please!"
The gathering fell into a sulky silence. Will Kinley stood looking out over them, his eyes nervous, his hand holding the mike close to his mouth so that they could hear his weak troffie voice.
"If you men have questions," he said, "I'll answer them now. Do you want to know what you've been doing during the past year?"
An affirmative rumble arose from the group.
"You've been helping to give Mars a breathable atmosphere." He glanced briefly at his watch, then looked back at his audience. "In fifty minutes, a controlled chain reaction will start in the tritium ice. The computers will time it and try to control it. Helium and oxygen will come blasting up out of the second hole."
A rumble of disbelief arose from his audience. Some-
one shouted: "How can you get air to blanket a planet from one hole?"
"You can't," Kinley replied crisply. "A dozen others are going in, just like that one. We plan three hundred, and we've already located the ice pockets. Three hundred wells, working for eight centuries, can get the job done."
"Eight centuries! What goodЧ"
"Wait!" Kinley barked. "In the meantime, we'll build pressurized cities close to the wells. If everything pans out, we'll get a lot of colonists here, and gradually condition them to live in a seven or eight psi atmosphereЧwhich is about the best we can hope to get. Colonists from the Andes and the HimalayasЧthey wouldn't need much conditioning."
"What about us?"
There was a long plaintive silence. Kinley's eyes scanned the group sadly, and wandered towards the Martian horizon, gold and brown in the late afternoon. "NothingЧabout us," he muttered quietly.
"Why did we come out here?"
"Because there's danger of the reaction getting out of hand. We can't tell anyone about it, or we'd start a panic." He looked at the group sadly. "I'm telling you now, be-cause there's nothing you could do. In thirty minutesЧ"
There were angry murmurs in the crowd. "You mean there may be an explosion?"
"There will be a limited explosion. And there's very little danger of anything more. The worst danger is in having ugly rumours start in the cities. Some fool with a slip-stick would hear about it, and calculate what would happen to Mars if five cubic miles of tritium ice detonated in one split second. It would probably start a riot. That's why we've kept it a secret."
The buzz of voices was like a disturbed beehive. Manue Nanti sat in the midst of it, saying nothing, wearing adazed and weary face, thoughts jumbled, soul drained of feeling.
Why should men lose their lungs that after eight centuries of tomorrows, other men might breathe the air of Mars as the air of Earth?
Other men around him echoed his thoughts in jealous mutterings. They had been helping to make a world in which they would never live.
An enraged scream arose near where Manue sat. "They're going to blow us up! They're going to blow up Mars."
"Don't be a fool!" Kinley snapped.
"Fools they call us! We are fools! For ever coming here! We got sucked in! Look at me!" A pale dark-haired man came wildly to his feet and tapped his chest. "Look! I'm losing my lungs! We're all losing our lungs! Now they take a chance on killing everybody."
"Including ourselves," Kinley called coldly.
"We oughta take him apart. We oughta kill everyone who knew about itЧand Kinley's a good place to start!"
The rumble of voices rose higher, calling both agreement and dissent. Some of Kinley's staff were looking nervously towards the trucks. They were unarmed.
"You men sit down!" Kinley barked.
Rebellious eyes glared at the supervisor. Several men who had come to their feet dropped to their hunches again. Kinley glowered at the pale upriser who called for his scalp.
"Sit down, Handell!"
Handell turned his back on the supervisor and called out to the others. "Don't be a bunch of cowards! Don't let him bully you!"
"You men sitting around Handell. Pull him down."
There was no response. The men, including Manue, stared up at the wild-eyed Handell gloomily, but made no move to quiet him. A pair of burly foremen started through
the gathering from its outskirts.
"Stop!" Kinley ordered. "Turpin, SchultzЧget back. Let the men handle this. themselves."
Half a dozen others had joined the rebellious Handell. They were speaking in low tense tones among themselves, "For the last time, men! Sit down!"
The group turned and started grimly towards the cliff. Without reasoning why, Manue slid to his feet quietly as Handell came near him. "Come on, fellow, let's get him," the leader muttered.
The Peruvian's fist chopped a short stroke to Handell's jaw, and the dull thuk echoed across the clearing. The man crumpled, and Manue crouched over him like a hissing panther. "Get back!" he snapped at the others. "Or I'll jerk his hoses out."
One of the others cursed him.
"Want to fight, fellow?" the Peruvian wheezed. "I can jerk several hoses out before you drop me!"
They shuffled nervously for a moment.
"The guy's crazy!" one complained in a high voice. "Get back or he'll kill Handell!"
They sidled away, moved aimlessly in the crowd, then sat down to escape attention. Manue sat beside the fallen man and gazed at the thinly smiling Kinley.
"Thank you, son. There's a fool in every crowd." He looked at his watch again. "Just a few minutes, men. Then you'll feel the earth-tremor, and the explosion, and the wind. You can be proud of that wind, men. It's new air for Mars, and you made it."
"But we can't breathe it!" hissed a troffie.
Kinley was silent for a long time, as if listening to the distance. "What man ever made his own salvation?" he murmured.
They packed up the public address amplifier and came down the hill to sit in the cab of a truck, waiting.
It came as an orange glow in the south, and the glow was quickly shrouded by an expanding white cloud. Then, minutes later the ground pulsed beneath them, quivered and shook. The quake subsided, but remained as a hint of vibration. Then after a long time, they heard the dull-throated thundering across the Martian desert. The roar continued steadily, grumbling and growling as it would do for several hundred years.