"Severna Park - The Three Unknowns" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Severna)

a rebreather mask all day long. The cold had chapped his cheeks and forehead. "I'm Hoshi's assistant."
He took her pack and swung it onto the floor behind the seats. "I've heard so much about you," he said
as though he'd rehearsed the line, "it's very exciting to have you here." He opened a cabinet under the
dashboard that was actually a tiny fridge. "We've got coffee and protein supplements."
Althea gave him her nicest smile. He gave her a paper bag sealed with a sticker marked The Fourth
World.

The drive to Candor Chasma took ten hours. She tried to stay awake for all of it, but Jeff was politely
uncommunicative, and the red dust in the tractor's headlights wasn't the part of Mars she'd come to see.
When she stared into the starlit dark outside the window, all she could think about was Neznaiyu. She
knew she should be grilling Jeff about the details of Hoshi's dig, but instead Althea found herself replaying
what she could remember of the footage from Neznaiyu. She and her colleagues at Oxford had oohed
and ahhed at the pretty flowers in a night-blooming forest and a sandy brook under a sky the color of
turquoise. Althea peered into the Martian night as the tractor shuddered in a sudden wind. The stars
vanished behind swirls of black dust. Sand and gravel rattled against the windows. Jeff downshifted with
a reassuring smile, lit green under his nose and chin by the glow of the dashboard. She touched the cold
window with her fingertips. On Neznaiyu the weather was lovely. On Neznaiyu, the aliens had left behind
their written words.

When she was finished with Hoshi, she would find a way to go and read them.




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Act III




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Althea woke up as the sun rose into the pink sky over Candor Chasma.
The archaeological camp looked like a trailer park in the driest parts of Arizona, but with much weirder
scenery. Candor's cliffs were an asymmetric crumble of disintegrating crimson geology looming over ten
white plastic housing units, each the size and general shape of a boxcar. They stood in a row on one side
of the dirt road, linked to each other by pressurized tunnels that looked like vacuum-cleaner hoses on a
giant scale. Unlike the concrete fortress of the ground station, the buildings at Candor seemed like they
could blow away at any time.

"There's the dig," said Jeff, pointing to the other side of the road.

Opposite the housing units, yards of nylon string stretched in meter-square grid lines across the geometric
ditches that had replaced Hoshi's great big hole in the ground. Underneath clouds of wafting red dust,
Althea caught a glimpse of the walls.