"James Van Pelt - Lashawnda at the End" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pelt James Van)

said, breaking off a chip of metal from what should have been the smooth underside. Her hand rested in
dark mud, but even as I watched, the color leached away. The ground sucked water like a sponge, and
underneath the normally arid surface, a dozen plant species waited to store the rare substance. Even now
the water would be spreading beneath my feet, pumped from one cell to the next. Ten years’ worth of
moisture for this little valley, delivered all at once.

She looked at me, smiling through the face shield. “I never checked the water tanks, but I’ll bet there was
trace condensation on them in the mornings, enough for fungus to live on, and whatever they secreted as
wasteate right through. Look at this, Spencer.” She yanked hard at the tank’s underside, snapping off
another hunk of metal, then handed it to me. “It’s honeycombed.”

The metal covered my hand but didn’t weigh any more than a piece of balsa wood. Bits crumbled from
the edge when I ran my gloved fingers over it.

“Isn’t that marvelous?” she said.

First Chair said, “It’s not all gone, is it? Not the other tank too?” He moved beside the next tank, rapped
his knuckles on it, producing a resonant note. He was fifty, practically a child, and this was only his
second expedition in command. “Damn.” He looked into the dry, bathtub-shaped pit in the rock beside
the tank where the water undoubtably drained when the bottom broke out.

Lashawnda checked the pipes connecting the tanks to the ship. “There’s more here, after only ten days.
How remarkable.”

First Chair rapped the tank again thoughtfully. “What are our options?”

The environmental engineer said, “We recycle, alot . No more baths.”

“Yuck,” said someone.

He continued, “We can build dew traps, but there isn’t much water in the atmosphere. We’re not going
to get a lot that way.”

“Can we make it?” said First Chair.

The engineer shrugged. “If nothing breaks down.”

“Check the ship. If this stuff eats at the engines, we won’t be going anywhere.”

They shuffled away, stirring dust with their feet. I stayed with Lashawnda. “A daily bleach wash would
probably keep things clean,” she said. She crouched next to the pipes, her knees grinding into the dirt. I
flinched, thinking about microscopic spores caught in her suit’s fabric. The spores had killed Marvin and
Beatitude. On the third day they’d come in from setting a weather station atop a near hill, and they rushed
the decontamination. Why would they worry? After all, the air tested breathable. We all knew that the
chances of a bacteria from an alien planet being dangerous to our Earth-grown systems were remote, but
we didn’t plan on water-hungry spores that didn’t care at all what kind of proteins we were made of. The
spores only liked the water, and once they’d settled into the warm, moist ports of the two scientist’s
lungs, they sprouted like crazy, sending tendrils through their systems, breaking down human cells to build
their own structures. In an hour the two developed a cough. Six hours later, they were dead. Working
remote arms through the quarantine area, I helped zip Beatitude into a body bag after the autopsy.