"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 4 - The Martians" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

became interested in each other. It was pure science for both of them, at
first; they were very much alike in that, and also in that both were so
straightforward and guileless that Michel was able to overhear many of their
first conversations. They were all shop talk; Martian geology, with Sax
grilling her for the most part, learning from her as from a professor, but
always able to contribute from the standpoint of a theoretical physicist, one
of the leading lights a decade or two before, in his postgraduate years. Not
that Ann seemed to care about that. She was a geologist, a planetologist who
had studied Mars ever since grad school, until now in her


forties she was one of the acknowledged authorities. A Martian ahead of the
fact. So if Sax was interested, she could talk Mars for hours; and Sax was
interested. So they talked on and on.

'It's a pure situation, you have to remember that. There might even be
indigenous life, left there underground from the early warm wet period. So
that we have to make a sterile landing and a sterile colony. Put a cordon
sanitaire between us and Mars proper. Then a comprehensive search. If Terran
life were allowed to invade the ground before we determined the presence or
absence of life, it would be a disaster for science. And the contamination
might work the other way too. You can't be too careful. No - if anyone tries
to infect Mars, there will be opposition. Maybe even active resistance. Poison
the poisoners. You can never tell what people will do.'
Sax said little or nothing in reply to this.

Then one day it was those two, appearing as deadpan and phlegmatic as ever,
who went out for night walks at the (carefully offset) same time, and, Michel
saw through his goggles, made their way to Lookout Point. They might have been
among those Michel had already seen out there. They sat there beside each
other for some time.
But when they came back Sax's colour was high, and he saw nothing of the
world inside the compound. Autistic to all. And Ann's brow was furrowed, her
eye distracted. And they did not talk to each other, or even look at each
other, for many days after that. Something had happened out there!
But as Michel watched them, fascinated by this turn of events, he came
to understand that he would never know what it had been. A wave of - what was
it - grief? Or sorrow, at their distance from each other, their isolation -
each in his or her own private world, sealed vessels jostling - cut off - the
futility of his work - the deathly cold of the black night - the ache of
living life so inescapably alone. He fled.
Because he was one of the evaluators, he could flee. He could leave Lake
Vanda from time to time on the rare helicopter visits, and though he tried not
to, in order to establish better solidarity with

_the group, still he had done it once before, in the darkest depth of winter
before the solstice, after seeing Maya and Frank together. Now, though the
midday twilights were returning, he took up an invitation from an acquaintance
at McMurdo to visit the Scott and Shackleton huts, just north of McMurdo on
Ross Island.