"Emil Petaja - The Caves of Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Petaja Emil)

The Caves of Mars
By Emil Petaja
Scanned by BW-SciFi
 I
Ric Coltor looked down, way down, to where Calcity winked in the night. Calcity stretched out over
what had once been coast, then forest, then desert. Now it was a maze of towers, steel and glass business
battlements, spidery flow-ramps. Further down some self-conscious older buildings huddled, ashamed.
There were a few private copters and late cabs idling across the night. But up here Ric was the only
evidence of life. He had the winter wind and the foretaste of death all to himself.
He'd stopped at a bar and downed two quick drinks before his climb up this neon-splashed ad pylon on
the highest building he could find. But he wasn't fuzzy. By no means! Wind pressed his leanness against a
narrow strut; three inches of steel supported his booted feet. His normal one-seventy muscular pounds had
wasted to one forty-eight those months in the space hospital; that, taken together with enforced abstinence,
and the alcohol should have hit him like a ton of bricks. But it didn't. State of mind, he decided, grimly.
Never had his mind cut so sharp a swath at life; never had his senses taken such a hungry bite at conscious
existence. Why way up here? That was easy. Space had been his life. This was as close to it as he'd ever
get again.
The dope they'd kept him on, against unbearable physical and psychological pain, was all worn off. Back
in the hospital time had mushed together in a mindless lump, a vehicle for continuous torment. So they'd
kept him under drugs practically all of the time.
Now, suddenly, this rush of intense feeling.
He didn't want it. He couldn't bear to think ahead, either. He couldn't bear to look down at the plastic
arm they had glued onto his right shoulder stump. It worked after a fashion, sure. It had helped him climb up
here. But, being the kind of man he was, an awkward mechanical arm just wasn't enough. He couldn't take
it. He wouldn't. So ...
The thoughts churned up. Happy ones. Angry ones. They took hold of his sharpened senses and
somehow they only honed down the knife.
From the time Richard Franklin Coltor was old enough to grab a hold of whatever chunk of matter his
parents had first tossed him to play with, he had grabbed it with both hands. That was the key. Both eager
fists. At fourteen he stowed away on a moonship because they laughed at his eagerness and kicked his tail
out of the Union office when he swaggered in demanding a space job, any kind so long as it was spaceside.
Guts and perspicacity won out and they kept him on. To Ric Coltor life was not to be nibbled at but
gulped dry, ravished with your whole being.
Pushing thirty now, the arbitrary age when hardcore spacemen were given a penetrating twice-over by
the meds—especially pilots—Ric would normally have been given the emphatic nod for a good twenty
more years of exploratory seat-of-the-pants spacing.
It fed his soul, being part of the big push which now included a landing or near-look at all the Sol planets,
major and minor. Next stop, Alpha. Ric had done his share; more. He'd crossed swords with death on a
daily basis. He loved it. To toe dance down that skittish ribbon that separates life from death was to know
what existence was all about.
But now ...

"Come back early next week. Tuesday okay? We'll check up on that new arm." Doc Ace Rannigan was
wiry and all elbows, like a grasshopper, the way he moved and cocked his head, but thank God he didn't talk
with that enforced Pippa cheery tone some of the others used on him. That did make Ric curl up at the
toes. Flat. Dry. Efficient.
Ric flexed his new fingers and shuddered. It wasn't that moving this skillful mechanical member caused
pain, which it did, it was knowing what it represented. "I don't want to live half a man," shot-up soldiers
used to say. But usually they would come around. Not Ric. He simply wasn't the type.
He said nothing. Doc Rannigan had done his best. What more could he do? Medical science hadn't