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

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 had
proved that. Muriel and David had provided as much inspiring footage as
possible, both in flight and at home in their dome shelter, which they kept at
about 75 degree so they could lounge around in front of the cameras with very
little clothing but the planet hadn't produced anything spectacular, and that
was the problem. Unless they could come up with something about Mars that would
inspire the masses back home, theirs would likely be the only mission there in
the twenty-first century.

"There's always the Face," Muriel had said when the subject had first come up.
Ever since a Viking photo had shown what looked to be a face staring up out of
the Martian landscape, tabloid newspapers had been milking the story to death.
They'd printed photos of the face and the mysterious pyramids surrounding it,
photos retouched to make it look like the face was changing expression, speaking
even crying when the Pope died. The Martian Face was such a popular symbol that
when NASA had announced its intention to send an expedition to Mars, the
tabloid-reading public had naturally assumed the whole reason was to check out
the face.