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

freezing, would be fresh-water ice, and so would not thaw again until the
temperature rose above zero, usually in the following summer when trapped
sunlight would greenhouse in the water under the ice, and melt it from below.
As Tatiana explained the process it hovered in Michel's mind as some kind of
analogy to their own situation, hanging right on the edge of his understanding
but never coming clear.
'Anyway,' she was saying, 'scientists can use the pond as a single-
setting minimum-temperature thermometer. Come here in the spring and you know
immediately if the previous winter has got below minus 54.'
As it had already, some cold night this autumn; a layer of white ice
sheeted the pond. Michel stood with Tatiana on the whitish,


humped, salt-crusted shore. Over the Dais the noon sky was blueblack. Around
them the steep valley walls fell to the floor of the canyon. Large dark
boulders stuck out of the pond's ice sheet.
Tatiana walked out onto the white surface, plunging through it with
every step, boots crackling, water splashing - liquid salt water, spilling
over the fresh ice, dissolving it and sending up a thin frost smoke. A vision:
the Lady of the Lake, become corporeal and thus too heavy to walk on water.
But the pond was only a few centimetres deep, it barely covered the tops
of her thick boots. Tatiana reached down and touched the tip of one gloved
finger into the water, pulled up her mask to taste the water with her
impossibly beautiful mouth - which puckered to a tight square. Then she threw
back her head and laughed. 'My God! Come taste, Michel, but just a touch, I
warn you. It's terrible!'
And so he clomped through the ice and over the wet sand floor of the
pond, stepping awkwardly, a bull in a china shop.
'It's fifty times saltier than the sea, taste it.'
Michel reached down, put his forefinger in the water; the cold was
intense, it was amazing that it was liquid still, so cold it was. He raised it
to his tongue, touched gingerly: cold fire. It burned like acid. 'My God!' he
exclaimed, spitting out involuntarily. 'Is it poison?' Some toxic alkali, or a
lake of arsenic
'No no.' She laughed. 'Salts only. A hundred and twenty-six grams of
salt per litre of water. As opposed to three point seven grams per litre, in
seawater. Incredible.' Tatiana was a geochemist, and so now shaking her head
with amazement. This kind of thing was her work. Michel saw her beauty in a
new way, masked but perfectly clear.
'Salt raised to a higher power,' he said absently. A concentrated
quality. So it might be in the Mars colony; and suddenly the idea he had felt
hovering over him descended: The ordinary sea-salt of humanity would be
concentrated by their isolation into a poisonous pond.
He shuddered and spat again, as if he could reject such a bad thought.
But the taste remained.

As the perpetual darkness stretches on it becomes hard not to think it
permanent, as if we are lingering on after the local star has burnt out.
People (some of them) are finally beginning to act as if they are being
tested. As if the world has indeed ended, and we existing in some