"Robert F. Young - The Worlds of Robert F. Young" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

"Blue," breathed Birp.
"Blue," murmured Far del.
"Bluer gasped Pempf.
"Well, of course, blue," said the captain gently. "Haven't our astronomers maintained all along that the
blueness of Earth could not be wholly attributable to the light-absorbent properties of its atmosphere?
The soil had to be blue!"
He knelt down and scooped up a handful of the wondrous substance. It trickled through his fingers
like blue mist "The blue sands of Earth," he whispered reverently.
 He straightened up and took off his hat and stood in the sparkling sunlight and let the clean Earth
wind blow through his hair. In the distance the city tinkled like glass chimes, and the wind wafted the
sound across the blue sands to his ears, and he thought of warm Martian summers and long laky days,
and hot afternoons, drinking lemonade on Grandmother Frimpfs front porch.
Presently he became aware that someone was breathing down the back of his neck. He turned
irritably. "What is it, Birp?"
Birp cleared his throat. "Beg pardon, sir," he said, 'but don't you think the occasion calls forтАФI mean
to say, sir, that it's been a long voyage, and Pempf and Fardel and myself, we're a little thirтАФI mean,
we're a little tense, and we thoughtтАФ"
He quailed before the scorn in the captain's eyes. 'Very well," the captain said coldly. "Open up a
case of the rotgut. But only one, understand? And if I find a single empty bottle defiling this virgin
landscape I'll clap every one of you in the brig!"
Birp had started off at a gallop toward the ship. He paused at the captain's admonition. "But what'll
we do with them, sir? If we put them back in the ship, it'll take just that much more fuel to blast off, and
we're already short of fuel as it is."
The captain pondered for a moment. It was not a particularly abstruse problem, and he solved it with
a minimum of difficulty. "Bury them," he said.
While the crew chug-a-lugged their beer the captain stood a little to one side, staring at the distant
city. He pictured himself telling his wife about it when he got back to Mars, and he saw himself sitting at
the dinner table, describing the pastel towers and the shining spires and the sad and shattered buildings.
In spite of himself, he saw his wife, too. She was sitting across the table from him, listening and
eating. Mostly eating. Why, she was even fatter now than she'd been when he left. For the thousandth
time he found himself wondering why wives had to get so fatтАФso fat sometimes that their husbands had
to wheel them around in wife-barrows. Why couldn't they get up and move around once in a while
instead of going in whole hog for every labor-saving device the hucksters put on the market? Why did
they have to eat, eat, eat, all the time?
The captain's face paled at the thought of the grocery bill he would have to pay upon his return, and
presently the grocery bill directed his mind to other equally distressing items, such as the national sales
tax, the mad tax, the tree tax, the gas tax, the grass tax, the air tax, the first-world-war tax, the
second-world-war tax, the third-world-war tax and the fourth-world-war tax.
He sighed. It was enough to drive a man to drink, paying for wars your father, your grandfather, your
great-grandfather and your great-great-grandfather had fought in! He looked enviously at Birp and
Pempf and Fardel. They weren't worried about their taxes. They weren't worried about anything. They
were dancing around the empty beer case like a trio of barbarians, and already they had made up a dirty
song about the blue sands of Earth.
Captain Frimpf listened to the words. His ears grew warm, then hot "All right, men, that's enough!"
he said abruptly. "Bury your bottles, burn the case and turn in. We've got a hard day ahead of us
tomorrow."
Obediently, Birp and Pempf and Fardel dug four rows of little holes in the blue soil and covered up
their dead soldiers one by one. Then, after burning the case and saying good night to the captain, they
went back into the ship.
The captain lingered outside. The moon was rising, and such a moon! Its magic radiance turned the