"Jerry Oltion - Pyramid Hoax" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

leading edge loomed like an assassin's knife, then slashed past only ten
meters
beyond their left wing.

David jabbed at the fire button for the port-side laser spectrometer, and a
beam
of intense blue light lanced out from the wingtip. Where it struck, the
pyramid's rock face erupted in a line of lava.
An instant later they were clear. Muriel pulled the plane up and around in a
crop-duster turn, then leveled out for another run. The building of the great
pyramid of Cydonia had begun.

The pyramid had always been there, of course. Building one of the
kilometer-high
mountains that littered the Cydonia plain would have taken the entire Army
Corps
of Engineers a couple centuries. Muriel and David were the only two people on
Mars, and they had struggled for over a week just to erect their living
bubble,
an inflated plastic dome covered with Martian soil for radiation shielding.
What
they were doing now was simply turning a natural feature into an alien
artifact
by drawing lines so it would look like something constructed.

This was the last week of a long and ultimately disappointing expedition.
They'd
been a year just in transit from Earth, a beefcake hunk of a man and a blonde
goddess of a woman packed into a cylinder smaller than most studio apartments,
driving each other crazy even though they'd been selected for compatibility
just
as much as for audience appeal or exploring ability. Arriving in Mars orbit
and
setting up their expedition base had broken the monotony, but the surveying
flights had quickly become as dull as drifting in space. Their plane was even
smaller than their spaceship, and it was almost all wing; after six weeks in
the
tiny cockpit, radar- and photo-mapping half the planet, they could count the
rivets in their sleep.

And to top it off, they hadn't made any Earth-shaking discoveries. Oh, they'd
learned all sorts of interesting things about the geological makeup of the
surface, and uncovered plenty of evidence that the stream beds seen in
satellite
photos had indeed carried water millions of years ago, but they hadn't
discovered anything useful in selling Mars to the tax-paying public, and that
was the real catastrophe. As AI Shepard had once said about the Mercury
program,
"No bucks, no Buck Rogers." You had to have public support if you wanted money
enough to fly; the near-death of the space program after the lunar landings