"Edgar Pangborn- West of the Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pangborn Edgar)

Published by
DELL PUBLISHING CO., INC

Copyright ┬й 1953, by Edgar Pangborn

All rights reserved
Reprinted by arrangement with
Doubleday & Company, Garden City, N.Y.

First Dell PrintingтАФJuly, 1966
Printed in U.S.A.




To Mary C. Pangborn



Part One
A.D. 2056




1
^┬╗

Morning was flowing over the red-green planet. "What do we know?" The delicate
brown face of Dorothy Leeds kindled with questions. "Summarize it."
Edmund Spearman achieved casualness. "Diameter and mass a trifle more than
Earth's, larger orbit around a larger sun. A year of 458 days, twenty-six hours each.
Moderate seasonal changes, axial tilt less than Earth's, orbit less elliptical. See the
smallness of the north polar ice cap? The equatorial regionтАФmuch too hot; the rest
is subtropical to temperate. We should go down (if we do) near the 50th
parallelтАФnorth, I'd say. Too much desert in the southern hemisphere. Might be hot
winds, sandstorms."
"The red-green is vegetation?" Dr. Christopher Wright teetered on long legs
before the screen, a classroom mannerism unchanged by eleven years in the
wilderness of space. He pinched and pulled the skin on his Adam's apple, his
hawk's-beak, small-chinned head jutting forward with an awkwardness not
aggressive but intent. Paul Mason thought: You love him or hate him. In either case
he's never quite grotesque. Wright's too-soft voice insisted: "It is, of course?"
"It has to be, Doc," Spearman said, and rubbed his bluish cheeks, looking older
than his thirty-two years. Already he showed frontal baldness, deeply bracketed
mouth corners. On Spearman's big shoulders was the burden of the ship. Watching
him now, Paul Mason was troubled by a familiar thought: Captain Jensen should
not have diedтАж "It has to be. The instruments show oxygen in Earth proportion, or
somewhat richer, plus nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The camera gives us tree
shadows in these latest photographs with the stronger lens. The air may make us