"Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Frank crouched beside her.
"We can keep working on him," the doctor said, "but I'm afraid he's
gone. Too long without oxygen, you know."
"Keep working on him," Maya said.
They did, of course. Eventually other medical people arrived, and
they carted him off to an emergency room. Frank, Maya, Sax, Samantha,
and a number of locals sat outside in the hall. Doctors came and went;
their faces had the blank look they took on in the presence of death.
Protective masks. One came out and shook his head. "He's dead. Too
long out there."
Frank leaned his head back against the wall.
When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest,
he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of
the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk glacier, and he
was crawling over it on hands and knees when the woman who was his
entire support team reached him; and he looked up at her out of a delirium,
and said "Where are all my friends?"
It was quiet. No sound but the low hum and whoosh that one never
escaped on Mars.
Maya put a hand on Frank's shoulder, and he almost flinched; his
throat clamped down to nothing, it really hurt. "I'm sorry," he managed to
say.
She shrugged the remark aside, frowned. She had somewhat the air of
the medical people. "Well," she said, "you never liked him much
anyway."
"True," he said, thinking it would be politic to seem honest with her at
that moment. But then he shuddered and said bitterly, "What do you know
about what I like or don't like."
He shrugged her hand aside, struggled to his feet. She didn't know;
none of them knew. He started to go into the emergency room, changed
his mind. Time enough for that at the funeral. He felt hollow; and
suddenly it seemed to him that everything good had gone away.
He left the medical center. Impossible not to feel sentimental at such
moments. He walked through the strangely hushed darkness of the city,
into the land of Nod. The streets glinted as if stars had fallen to the
pavement. People stood in clumps, silent, stunned by the news. Frank
Chalmers made his way through them, feeling their stares, moving without
thought toward the platform at the top of town; and as he walked he said to
himself, Now we'll see what I can do with this planet.


Part Two
The Voyage Out

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"Since they're going to go crazy anyway, why not just send insane
people in the first place, and save them the trouble?" said Michel Duval.
He was only half joking; his position throughout had been that the