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

Another day (or, in another hour of their endless night) Michel went out
with a group, to check on the climatology stations located around the lake
shore. They hauled banana sleds loaded with replacement batteries and tanks of
compressed nitrogen and the like. Michel, Maya, Charles, Arkady, Iwao, Ben,
and Elena.
They walked across Lake Vanda, Ben and Maya pulling the sleds. The
valley seemed huge. The frozen surface of the lake gleamed and sparked blackly
underfoot. To a northerner the sky already seemed overstuffed with stars, and
in the ice underfoot each star was shattered into many pricks of light. Next
to him Maya shone her flashlight down, lighting a field of cracks and bubbles
under her; it was like shining light into a glass floor that had no bottom.
She turned the flashlight off and it suddenly looked to Michel like the stars
of the other hemisphere were shining up through a clear world, an alien planet
much closer to the centre of its galaxy. Looking down into the black hole at
the centre of things, through burred starlight. Like the shattered bottomless
pool of the self. Every step broke the sight into a different refraction, a
kaleidoscope of white points in black. He could gaze down into Vanda for a
long time.
They came to the far shore of the lake. Michel looked back: their
complex sparked like a bright winter constellation coming up over the horizon.
Inside those boxes their companions were working, talking, cooking, reading,
resting. Tensions in there were subtle but high.

_ A door opened in the complex, a wedge of light was thrown onto
rust-coloured rock. It could have been Mars, sure; in a year or two it would
be. Many of the current tensions would be resolved. But there would be no air.
Outside they would go, yes, sometimes; but in spacesuits. Would that matter?
The winter suit he was wearing at that moment was as much like a spacesuit as
the designers could make it, and the frigid numbing downvalley breeze was like
breathing purified oxygen just gasified from liquid stock, and insufficiently
warmed. The sub-biological chill of Antarctica, of Mars; nothing much to
choose between them. In that sense this year of training and testing had been
a good idea. They were getting at least a taste of what it might be like.
Ben stepped down onto the uneven lower ice of the lake's summertime
moat, slipped and went down in a flash. He cried out and the others rushed to
him, Michel first because he had seen it happen. Ben groaned and writhed, the
others crouched around him
'Excuse me,' Maya said, and ducked between Michel and Arkady to kneel at Ben's
side.
'Is it your hip?'
'Ah - yeah -'
'Hold on. Hold steady.' Ben clutched at her arm and she held him on his
other side. 'Here, let's get your harness unclipped from the sled. Okay, slip
the sled under him. Move him gently! Okay. Hold still there, we'll get you
back to the station. Can you stay steady or should we strap you down? Okay,
let's go. Help stabilize the sled. Someone radio the station and tell them to
get ready for us.' She clipped her own harness onto the banana sled and
started back across the lake, quickly but steadily, almost ice-skating on her
boots, flashlight lit to show her the ice underfoot. The others followed
beside Ben.