"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 1 - Red Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

will go. In the brief hours of daylight, one of them might leave the camp and hike out to
Lookout Point; and another follow; and what happened out there might leave its mark
forever. But Michel would never know.

And then they left Antarctica, and the team was chosen. There were fifty men and
fifty women: thirty-five Americans, thirty-five Russians, and thirty miscellaneous
international affliates, fifteen invited by each of the two big partners. Keeping such
perfect symmetries had been difficult, but the selection committee had persevered.

The lucky ones flew to Cape Canaveral or Baikonur, to ascend to orbit. At this
point they both knew each other very well and did not know each other at all. They were
a team, Michel thought, with established friendships, and a number of group
ceremonies, rituals, habits, adn tendencies; and among those tendencies was an
instinct to hide, to play a role and disguise their real selves. Perhaps this was simply
the definition of village life, of social life. But it seemed to Michel that it was worse than
that; no one had ever before had to compete so strenuously to join a village; and the
resulting radical division between public life and private life was new, and strange.
Engrained in them now was a certain competitive undercurrent, a constant subtle feeling
that they were each alone, and that in case of trouble they were liable to be abandoned
by the rest, and yanked out of the group.

The selection committee had thus created some the very problems it had hoped to
prevent. Some of them were aware of this; and naturally they took care to include
among the colonists the most qualified psychiatrist they could think of.

So they sent Michel Duval.



-+=*=+-



At first it felt like a shove in the chest. Then they were pushed back in their chairs,
and for a second the pressure was deeply familiar: one gee, the gravity they would never
live in again. The Ares had been orbiting Earth at 28,000 kilometers per hour. For
several minutes they accelerated, the rockets' push so powerful that their vision blurred as
corneas flattened, and it took an effort to inhale. At 40,000 kilometers per hour the burn
ended. They were free of the EarthтАЩs pull, in orbit to nothing but the sun.

The colonists sat in the delta V chairs blinking, their skin flushed, their hearts
pounding. Maya Katarina Toitovna, the official leader of the Russian contingent, glanced
around. People appeared stunned. When obsessives are given their object of desire,
what do they feel? It was hard to say, really. In a sense their lives were ending; and yet
something else, some other life, had finally, finally begun. . . . Filled with so many emotions
at once, it was impossible not to be confused; it was an interference pattern, some
feelings cancelled, others reinforced. Unbuckling from her chair Maya felt a grin
contorting her face, and she saw on the faces around her the same helpless grin; all but
Sax Russell, who was as impassive as an owl, blinking as he looked over the readouts on
the room's computer screens.