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

chimney ... but try telling a small child that there's no such person as Santa.

Mars was in desperate need of a St. Nicholas, a Father Christmas, a Santa Claus. In m.y. 52, he arrived
in the form of Dr. Johann Spanjaard.

****

Despite the fact that I'm one of the few people on Mars who knew him well, there's very little I can tell
you about Doc Spanjaard. That's not much a surprise, though; folks came here for many different
reasons, and not always the best ones. Frontiers tend to attract people who didn't quite fit in the places
they came from, and on Mars it's impolite to ask someone about their past if they don't voluntarily offer
that information themselves. Some aresians will blabber all day about their home towns or their old job,
but others I've known for twenty years and still don't know where they were born, or even their real
names.

Johann Spanjaard fell somewhere between these extremes. He was born in Holland, but I don't know
when: around a.d. 2030 is my best guess, since he appeared to be in his early forties when he arrived at
Arsia Station. He was trained as a paramedic, and briefly worked on Clarke County; and later at
Descartes Station. He was a Moon War vet; he told me that he witnessed the Battle of Mare
Tranquillitatis, but if he had any combat medals he never showed them to me. He returned to Earth,
stayed there a little while, left again to take a short job as a beltship doctor, then finally immigrated to
Mars. There were at least two women in his pastтАФAnja, his first wife, and Sarah, his secondтАФbut he
seldom spoke of them, although he sent them occasional letters.

No children. In hindsight, that may be the most significant fact of all: even after marrying and leaving two
wives, Doc didn't have any kids. Save that thought.

Doc Spanjaard immigrated to Mars in m.y. 52, five aresian years before the colonies broke away from
Pax. By then Arsia Station had become the largest colony; nearly a hundred thousand people lived in
reasonable comfort within the buckydomes and underground malls that had grown up around the base
camp of the original American expedition, just south of the Noctis Labyrinthis where, on a nice clear day,
you could just make out the massive volcanic cone of Arsia Mons looming over the western horizon. The
colony had finally expanded its overcrowded infirmary into a full-fledged hospital, and Doc was one of
the people hired to staff its new emergency ward.

I came to know Doc because of my job as an airship pilot. One of Arsia General's missions was
providing medical airlifts to our six neighbor colonies in the western hemisphere; although they had
infirmaries of their own, none possessed Arsia General's staff or equipment. The hospital had contracted
my employer, AeroMars, to fly doctors out to these remote settlements and, on occasion, bring back
patients for treatment. Within two sols of Doc's arrival at Arsia General, I flew him over the Valles
Marineris to Wellstown so he could treat a burn victim from an explosion at the fuel depot. We ended up
hauling the poor guy back to Arsia Station that same day; the sortie lasted twenty-seven hours, coming
and going, and when it was over we were too wired to go to bed, so we wandered over to the Mars
Hotel and had a few beers.

That trip established a regular pattern for us: fly out, do what had to be done, fly back, hand the case
over to the ER staff, then head to the nearest taproom to decompress. However, I seldom saw Doc
Spanjaard get loaded; three beers was his limit, and he never touched hard liquor. Which was fine with
me; I'm a featherweight drinker myself, and two beers was the most I'd allow myself because I never
knew when I'd get beeped to drag Miss Thuvia back into the sky again. But the three of us logged a lot