"Ian R. MacLeod - Home Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

astronauts have up-to-date equipment. And they're all Taiwanese.

The outer hatch booms open. The shiny outsuit hisses and squeals as it adjusts
to the 60-degree drop in temperature. I climb out and down. The white hits my
eyes. My lungs go solid tight inside my chest. I glance back. Janey's face is at
the porthole. She gives me a smile and a wave, like someone moving off on a
train. I stomp a few yards across the ice.

Epsilon is shaped like a dumpy starfish. The central mound contains the main
life support systems and the comms bay, with the kitchen, the torpedo tubes, the
living bay, the medical bay and snout of the canhopper fanning off. I can't say
that Epsilon actually looks like a starfish because --in the one part of the
deal that our college really held out for--the whole of the outer body was
re-coated in military-grade camouflage paint before we left our home time. Even
now, from what must be no more than twenty shuffling paces away, I have to
squint hard to make it out as more than another frost ghost given momentary
reality by the wind. Janey's gone. Figgis, too. I could almost be alone.

I pick my way around the drifts and hollows, checking for accidental debris;
anomalies that would almost certainly destroy us. The bitter wind pushes and
pulls at me like an argument. It roars in my ears. I do a slow circuit of
Epsilon, then another for luck. The wind has already raked away my first
footsteps. I brush ice away from the canhopper's cockpit.

"Woolley!" Janey's voice suddenly crackles over the wind in my ears. "What are
you doing out there?"

"Won't be long," I say, then pluck off a glove to reach inside my hood and
dislodge the comms wire. I don't need you, Janey, not out here. Woolley doesn't
need anyone.

I breathe the air. The wind snatches the frozen vapor from my lips and throws it
back in my face as grit. Overhead, the sky is lace over blue oblivion. When I
was a child and my mother first told me stories about this place, I used to
imagine that there really was a pole up here, striped like a candy stick, around
which the planet revolved.

I squint, darkening the lenses of my goggles by a couple of notches with the
presspad inside my mittens as I re-inspect the ground. But it makes little
difference. Pure Antarctic roars over my inadequate senses. I'm leaning twenty
degrees into the wind just to stand up. Looking down at my feet, I see the drift
ice racing. Nothing feels still. Snow here is as rare as rain in a desert; all
that ever happens is that the wind drives the ice, scooping it into high drifts,
baring the underlying strata, destroying-- thank God--every trace of life. White
on white on white. I still have to keep reminding myself that we are in the Year
of Our Lord, 1890.

Gladstone is Prime Minister in England. Zeta Tauri is still a distant star.
Etcetera, etcetera. Look at it this way: if I fumed my back and walked out
across the ice away from Epsilon, if I crossed the Queen Maud Mountains and got