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

of klicks together; once I had the princess tied down in her hangar and Doc had washed someone else's
blood off his hands, we'd park our rumps in a quiet bar and tap mugs for a job well done.

We were a mutt-'n-jeff team if there ever was one. Doc was tall and preposterously skinny, with solemn
blue eyes and fair skin that helmet burn had freckled around his trim white beard; imagine an underfed St.
Nicholas and you've got it down. I was the short, dumpy black sidekick from Tycho City who had a
thing for Burroughs classics and loved old Eddie Murphy movies even though I had never spent more
than two weeks on Earth (what can I say? he made me laugh). But Doc had a wry sense of humor that
most people didn't see, and I was the only airlift pilot who wouldn't panic when he had to perform a
emergency tracheotomy at twelve hundred meters with a utility knife and a pen.

We saw a lot of action over the course of the next nine months; by my count, we saved at least thirty
lives and lost only four. Not bad for two guys whose biggest complaint was losing a lot of sleep. The
Martian Chronicle caught wind of our act and wanted to do a story on us. We talked it over during a
ride back from Sagan, then radioed back to Arsia General and arranged for the reporter to meet us at
the Mars Hotel after we got home. The reporter was there, along with his photographer and one of Doc's
former patients, a sweet young thing from West Bank whose heart was still beating again due to Doc's
ministrations and my flying skills, but gee gosh, we forgot where we were supposed to meet them and
went to Lucky Pierre's instead. Two more missed interviews, followed by profuse apologies and sworn
promises that we'd be at the right place next time, went by before the Chronicle finally got the message.
On Mars, the phrase тАЬmind your own businessтАЭ is taken seriously, even by the press.

But it wasn't always funny stuff. Our job took us places you'd never want to see, the settlements
established along the equatorial zone surrounding the Valles Marineris. Over forty Earth years had
elapsed since First Landing, and humankind had made substantial footholds on this big red planet, yet
beyond the safe, warm confines of Arsia Station life could be pretty grim. New Chattanooga was infested
with sandbugs, the seemingly indestructible mites which lived in the permafrost and homed in on any
aquifer large enough for them to lay eggs; the colony's water tanks were literally swimming with them, and
despite the best filtration efforts they were in every cup of coffee you drank and every sponge-bath you
took. DaVinci was populated by neocommunists who, despising bourgeois culture and
counterrevolutionary influences, wanted little to do with the rest of the colonies, and therefore turned
down most aid offered by Arsia Station. Their subsurface warrens were cold and dimly-lit, their denizens
hard-eyed and ready to quote Mao Tse Tung as soon as you entered the airlock. Viking, the
northernmost settlement, was located on the Chryse Planitia near the Viking I landing site: two hundred
people huddled together in buckydomes while eking out the most precarious of existences, and every
time we visited them, the population had grown a little smaller. And people spoke only in hushed tones
about Ascension, the settlement near Sagan just south of the Valles Marineris that had been founded by
religious zealots; living in self-enforced isolation, running short of food and water, finally cut off from the
neighboring colonies by the planetwide dust storm of m.y. 47, its inhabitants began murdering one
another, then cannibalizing the corpses.

Doc and I saw a side of the Martian frontier that most people on Earth didn't even know existed:
hypothermia, malnutrition, disease, injuries caused by carelessness or malfunctioning equipment,
psychosis, and not a few deaths. We did what we could, then we flew home and tried to drown our
sorrows in homemade brew. There's many wonderful things about Mars, but it's not Earth or even the
Moon; this is a place with damned little mercy, and those it doesn't kill outright, it conspires to drive
insane.

Perhaps we went a little stir-crazy ourselves, for one night in the Mars Hotel we got to talking about what
we missed about Christmas.