"G. Stanley Weinbaum - The Best of Stanley G Weinbaum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weinbaum Stanley G)

more than twenty-five miles into it. And right there, Putz's pet motor quit!'
'Quit? How?' Putz was solicitous.
'The atomic blast got weak. I started losing altitude right away, and suddenly there I was with a
thump right in the middle of Thyle! Smashed my nose on the window, too!' He rubbed the injured
member ruefully.
 'Did you maybe try vashing der combustion chamber mit acid sulphuric?' inquired Putz. 'Sometimes
der lead giffs a secondary radiation-'
'Naw!' said Jarvis disgustedly. 'I wouldn't try that, of course - not more than ten times! Besides, the
bump flattened the landing gear and busted off the under-jets. Suppose I got the thing working - what
then? Ten miles with the blast coming right out of the bottom and I'd have melted the floor from under
me!' He rubbed his nose again. 'Lucky for me a pound only weighs seven ounces here, or I'd have been
mashed flat!'
'I could have fixed!' ejaculated the engineer. 'I bet it vas not serious.'
'Probably not,' agreed Jarvis sarcastically. 'Only it wouldn't fly. Nothing serious, but I had the choice
of waiting to be picked up or trying to walk back - eight hundred miles, and perhaps twenty days before
we had to leave! Forty miles a day! Well,' he concluded, 'I chose to walk. Just as much chance of being
picked up, and it kept me busy.'
'We'd have found you,' said Harrison.
'No doubt. Anyway, I rigged up a harness from some seat straps, and put the water tank on my
back, took a cartridge belt and revolver, and some iron rations, and started out.'
'Water tank!' exclaimed the little biologist, Leroy. 'She weigh one-quarter ton!'
'Wasn't full. Weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds earthweight, which is eighty-five here.
Then, besides, my own personal two hundred and ten pounds is only seventy on Mars, so, tank and all, I
grossed a hundred and fifty-five, or fifty-five pounds less than my everyday earthweight. I figured on that
when I undertook the forty-mile daily stroll. Oh - of course I took a thermo-skin sleeping bag for these
wintry Martian nights.
'Off I went, bouncing along pretty quickly. Eight hours of daylight meant twenty miles or more. It got
tiresome, of course - plugging along over a soft sand desert with nothing to see, not even Leroy's
crawling biopods. But an hour or so brought me to the canal - just a dryditch about four hundred feet
wide, and straight as a railroad on its own company map.
'There'd been water in it sometime, though. The ditch was covered with what looked like a nice
green lawn. Only, as I approached, the lawn moved out of my way!'
'Eh?' said Leroy.
'Yeah, it was a relative of your biopods. I caught one, a little grass-like blade about as long as my
finger, with two thin, stemmy legs.'
'He is where?' Leroy was eager.
'He is let go! I had to move, so I plowed along with the walking grass opening in front and closing
behind. And then I was out on the orange desert of Thyle again.
'I plugged steadily along, cussing the sand that made going so tiresome, and, incidentally, cussing that
cranky motor of yours, Karl. It was just before twilight that I reached the edge of Thyle, and looked
down over the gray Mare Chronium. And I knew there was seventy-five miles of that to be walked over,
and then a couple of hundred miles of that Xanthus desert, and about as much more Mare Cimmerium.
Was I pleased? I started cussing you fellows for not picking me up!'
'We were trying, you sap!' said Harrison.
'That didn't help. Well, I figured I might as well use what was left of daylight in getting down the cliff
that bounded Thyle. I found an easy place, and down I went. Mare Chronium was just the same sort of
place as this - crazy leafless plants and a bunch of crawlers; I gave it a glance and hauled out my sleeping
bag. Up to that time, you know, I hadn't seen anything worth worrying about on this half-dead world -
nothing dangerous, that is.'
'Did you?' queried Harrison.