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

stopped to join this group. Free at last; it was hard to believe, they were actually on their
way to Mars! Knots of people talking, many of them world class in their fields; Ivana had
won part of a Nobel prize in chemistry, Vlad was one of the most famous medical
biologists in the world, Sax was in the pantheon of great contributors to subatomic theory,
Hiroko was unmatched in enclosed biological life support systems design, and so on all
around; a brilliant crowd!

And she was one of their leaders. It was a bit daunting. Her engineering and
cosmonautic skills were modest enough, it was her diplomatic ability that had gotten her
aboard, presumably. Chosen to head the disparate, fractious Russian team, with the
several commonwealth membersтАФwell, that was okay. It was interesting work, and she
was used to it. And her skills might very well turn out to be the most important ones
aboard. They had to get along, after all. And that was a matter of guile, and cunning, and
will. Willing other people to do your bidding! She looked at the crowd of glowing faces,
and laughed. Everyone aboard was good at their work, but some were gifted far beyond
that. She had to identify those people, to seek them out, to cultivate them. Her ability to
function as leader depended on it; for in the end, she thought, they would surely become a
kind of loose scientific meritocracy. And in a such a society as that, the extraordinarily
talented constituted the real powers. When push came to shove, they would be the
colony's true leadersтАФthey, or those who influenced them.

She looked around, located her opposite number, Frank Chalmers. In Antarctica she
had not gotten to know him very well. A tall, big, swarthy man. He was talkative enough,
and incredibly energetic; but hard to read. She found him attractive. Did he see things as
she did? She had never been able to tell. He was talking to a group across the length of
the room, listening in that sharp inscrutable way of his, head tilted to the side, ready to
pounce with a witty remark. She was going to have to find out more about him. More than
that, she was going to have to get along with him.

She crossed the room, stopped by his side, stood so their upper arms just barely
touched. Leaned her head in toward his. A brief gesture at their comrades: тАЬThis is
going to be fun, donтАЩt you think?тАЭ

Chalmers glanced at her. тАЬIf it goes well,тАЭ he said.

###

After the celebration and dinner, unable to sleep, Maya wandered through the Ares .
All of them had spent time in space before, but never in anything like the Ares , which was
enormous. There was a kind of penthouse at the front end of the ship, a single tank like a
bowsprit, which rotated in the opposite direction the ship did, so that it held steady. Solar
watch instruments, radio antennas, and all the other equipment which worked best without
rotation were located in this tank, and at the very tip of it was a bulbous room of
transparent plastic, a chamber quickly named the bubble dome, which provided the crew
with a weightless, non-rotating view of the stars, and a partial view of the great ship behind
it.

Maya floated near the window wall of this bubble dome, looking back at the ship
curiously. It had been constructed using space shuttle external fuel tanks; around the turn
of the century NASA and Glavkosmos had begun attaching small booster rockets to the