"Kim Stanley Robinson - Icehenge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

He shook his head. "I was wondering myself yesterday. I guess there's classified cargo
in there. I was told to leave it alone."
"It's our storage room," I said, irritated.
Al shrugged. "Ask Captain Swann about it."
"I will."
Now Eric Swann and I were old friends, and I was upset that something was going on
in my area that he had failed to tell me about. So when I found him on the bridge, I came
straight to the point.
"Eric, how come I'm locked out of one of my own storage rooms? What have you got
in there?"
Immediately he blushed as red as his hair, and hung his head. The two rocketry and
guidance officers on the bridge looked down at their consoles.
"I can't tell you what's in there, Emma. It's classified. I can't tell anyone until later."
I stared at him. I know I can intimidate people if I look at them hard enough. His blush
got deeper, his freckles disappeared in the general redness, his blue eyes gave me a
watery stare. But he wasn't going to tell me. I curled my lip at him and left the bridge.
That was the first sign: a locked door, a secret reason for it. I thought to myself, We're
taking something for the Committee out to Ceres, perhaps. Weapons, no doubt. It was
typical of the Mars Development Committee to keep secrets. But I didn't jump to any
conclusions; merely stayed alert.
The second sign was one I probably would have missed, had I not been alerted by the
first. I was walking down the corridor to the dining commons, past the tapestry lounges
between the commons and the bedrooms, when I heard voices from a lounge and stopped.
Just the voices sounded funny, all whispery and rapid. I recognized John Dancer's voice:
"We can't do anything of the sort until after the rendezvous, and you know it."
"No one will notice," said a woman, perhaps Ilene Breton.
"You hope no one would notice," Dancer replied. "But you can't be sure that Duggins
or Nordhoff wouldn't stumble across it. We have to wait on everything until after the
rendezvous, you know that."
Then I heard steps across the velcro carpet behind me, and with a start I began to walk
again, past the door of the lounge. I looked in; John and Ilene, sure enough, among
several others. They all looked up as I appeared in the doorway, and their conversation
abruptly died. I stared at them and they stared back, at a loss for speech. I walked on to
the dining commons.
A rendezvous in the belt. A group of people, not the superior officers of the ship, in on
this event and keeping it a secret from the others. A locked storage hold.... Things were
not falling together for me.
After that I began to see things everywhere. People stopped talking when I walked by.
There were meetings late at night, in bedrooms. I walked by the radio room once, and
someone was sending out a long message through the coding machine. Quite a few of the
storage room doors were locked, back behind the farm; and some of the ore holds were
locked as well.
After a few days of this I shook my head and wondered if I were making it all up.
There were explanations for everything I had noticed. Shipboard life tends to become
cliquish on the best of runs; even though there were only forty of us, divisions would
spring up over the year of an expedition. And these were troubled times, back on Mars.
The consolidation of the various sectors under the central coordination of the Committee
was causing a lot of dissatisfaction. Sectionalism was rife, subversive groups were
everywhere, supposedly. These facts were enough to explain all the little factions I now
noticed on the Rust Eagle. And paranoia is one of the most common shipboard