"Oltion-PyramidHoax" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

JERRY OLTION

THE GREAT MARTIAN PYRAMID HOAX

About "The Great Martian Pyramid Hoax," Jerry is astonishingly, frighteningly. .
. silent.

At least if they recover the film, they'll find out how we died." David Nelson
struggled to keep his voice from quavering as he gripped the Jesus bar bolted to
the instrument panel before him, and he tried not to look at the kilometer-high
pyramid rushing toward the bridge of his nose.

Beside him in the scout plane, his companion, Muriel Mondou, seemed frozen in
place, her right hand steady on the control stick, her left poised on the
throttle. The instrument lights illuminated her form-fitting spacesuit with a
soft glow that accentuated all her curves, and even now as she flew the plane
into the yawning brink of disaster, David felt his hormones respond to the
sight. He was not unique in that. The news media back on Earth ran her photos
whenever they could, usually with captions like "Mon Dieu Muriel!" and they
wrote articles describing her as "a broad interpretation of the term, 'space
spectacular.'"

David, whose life depended more on her skills as an astronaut than on her
measurements, was just glad she could fly.

She had brought their airspeed down as slow as possible, but in Mars's thin
atmosphere that wasn't very slow. "If they recover the film, we're dead anyway,"
she said without looking away from the windshield.

David didn't bother asking why they were taking pictures, then. He'd already
argued that with her. Posterity, she'd said. They owed it to posterity to expose
the fraud once it'd served its purpose.

The proximity alarm went off with a bone-tingling wail, and David slapped the
quiet switch. His spacesuit wasn't nearly as form-fitting as hers, but after
weeks of operating the navigation and science controls while wearing it, he
hardly noticed the extra thickness of his gloves. "Two kilometers and closing,"
he said, but in the time it took him to say it, that distance had diminished by
half.

Deimos and a sky full of stars provided the only light. Without amplifier
goggles over their helmets they would have been flying nearly blind. Even with
the goggles, the pyramid was just a gray triangle against a black sky. Its
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