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

"Tonight and tomorrow night are all we've got before we make the daytime flyby,
and we may need both nights to do the touch-up work."

So off they'd gone, overjoyed to have slipped their reins for the first time
since they'd begun training for the mission, but when they arrived after a
three-hour flight they'd found the Face to be even less than they'd hoped for.
If it had been built to resemble a human visage, then it had been intended to be
seen only from orbit. Up close it was little more than an enormous sand dune
with blowout hollows in the right places to suggest eyes and a mouth. In
anything but oblique light, and from any view but directly overhead, it wouldn't
look like anything at all. And it was far too big for Muriel and David to modify
in any significant way, even with the fusion engine on their landing craft.

But the pyramids had looked promising. Straight-edged, flat-sided, all they
lacked was some sign of an intelligent hand in their construction. As the two
explorers circled the biggest of them, David had fired the laser spectrometer at
the side of it, letting it vaporize some of the rock surface so he could read an
emission spectrum from it and see what it was made of. Just ordinary Martian
dirt, it turned out, but when they'd made another pass and saw the spidery line
the laser had traced, Muriel had whooped with delight and said, "Hey, that's it!
We can carve it into blocks!"

After half a dozen passes, they backed off to study their handiwork. With the
exception of a minor squiggle in one line from turbulence, the laser bums were
arrow-straight and perfectly spaced.

"God, that looks great," David said. "They're just thin enough they won't show
up from orbit, so it'll look perfectly legit when we take close-ups the day
after tomorrow."

"I don't know, though," Muriel said. "They're fifty meters apart. Who's going to
believe Martians could lift fifty-meter blocks into place?"

David laughed. "You're kidding, right? We're talking about the kind of people
who thought the face was trying to speak."

"Ah. Good point."

"What worries me," said David, "is how we're going to cut the uprights. If we
want it to look like blockwork, we have to cut vertical joints, too, and they're
going to be a lot tougher. They have to connect with the horizontal lines, and
if we overshoot by more than a few centimeters, it'll blow the whole effect."

"Hmm." Muriel banked around for another look. She studied the lines for a minute
more, then said, "We could rig the uplink antenna motor to aim the forward
laser, and program the pattern we want into the navigation computer. If I flew
us straight toward the middle of the pyramid, it could draw the vertical lines
for us."