"Allen Steele - Zwarte Piet's Tale" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Allen)

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Even after all these years, I still consider that first Christmas tour to be our best. We ran short of candy
and toys before we were through, and we were bone-tired by the time we left Sagan for the last leg of
the circuit back to Arsia Station, yet we brought home with us the most exciting discovery since
microfossils were found in the Noctis Labyrinthis.

St. Nicholas was alive and well and living on Mars. How could nearly three hundred kids possibly be
wrong?

Sometimes it was tough. The children at Viking broke our hearts: grimy, hungry, wearing cast-off clothes,
but enchanted the moment we stepped through the airlock. None rejected our awful candy, and they
fought jealously over the crude toys from Doc's bag until we made sure that everyone had something to
take home. They took turns sitting in Sinterklass's lap, and he listened to stories of hardship and loss that
would have horrified the worst curmudgeon. Several kids were sallow and feverish with lingering illnesses
that required Doc to play physician as well as holiday saint; we were prepared for that, so after a sneaky
sort of examination ("How long is your tongue? I bet you've got the longest one here. Open your mouth
and let Sinterklass see. Oh, yes, you do, don't you...?") he'd send the sick ones over to Black Peter for a
card trick and a couple of pills; later, we'd give the rest of the prescription to their parents.

Sometimes it was funny. A little girl in New Chattanooga was adamant in her outspoken belief that
Sinterklass was a fake; the brat kept yanking at Doc's beard, tearing out white hair by its roots in her
dogged attempt to dislodge his mask. She got candy and a toyтАФno child came away empty-handed
during that first tourтАФbut before we left the following morning I tracked down her skinsuit in the
community ready-room and filled her boots with handfuls of sand. She was much nicer to us the next
year. Sagan's resident nymphomaniac decided that the holiday season wasn't complete until, in her
words, she had тАЬmade Santa's bells jingle.тАЭ She started by sitting in his lap and whispering something in
Doc's ear that succeeded in turning his nose bright red. At any other time, Doc might have obliged, once
they were safely away from the little ones, but he decided that this might set a bad precedent. To her
credit, she took his refusal with good grace ... and then she asked me why I was called Black Peter.

And, yeah, sometimes it was scary. A slow leak in one of her hydrogen cells caused Miss Thuvia to lose
altitude as we were flying from Viking to New Chattanooga. The pressure drop occurred while we were
flying over Cupri Chasm, one of the deepest parts of the Valles Marineris; for a few minutes, it looked as
if we would crash in the red-rock canyon dozens of kilometers below us. I awoke Doc from his nap and
he scrambled into the gondola's rear to open the ballast valves. When that wasn't enough, he shoved
some cargo containers out the airlockтАФincluding, much to our regret, one containing several bottles of
homemade wine we were freighting from Wellstown to the other colonies. We jettisoned enough weight
from the princess to keep her aloft just long enough to clear the chasm, but she left skid marks when she
landed at New Chattanooga. And then we had to put on our costumes and pretend that we hadn't just
cheated death by only a few kilos.

But it was fun, and it was exhilarating, and it was heart-warming, and it was good. Even before we
arrived back at Arsia Station, where we were greeted not by the small handful who had witnessed our
departure a week earlier but by hundreds of skinsuited colonists who surrounded the crater and threw up
their arms as Miss Thuvia came into sight, Doc and I swore to one another that we'd make the same trip
again next year.

It wasn't because our newfound fameтАФwe still ducked the Martian Chronicle when it came to us for an
interviewтАФor the lure of adventure, or even another shot at our cuddly friend in Sagan. It was simply