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

society as that, the extraordinarily talented constituted the real powers.
When push came to shove, they would be the colony's true leaders—they,
or those who influenced them.
She looked around, located her opposite number, Frank Chalmers. In
Antarctica she had not gotten to know him very well. A tall, big, swarthy
man. He was talkative enough, and incredibly energetic; but hard to read.
She found him attractive. Did he see things as she did? She had never
been able to tell. He was talking to a group across the length of the room,
listening in that sharp inscrutable way of his, head tilted to the side, ready
to pounce with a witty remark. She was going to have to find out more
about him. More than that, she was going to have to get along with him.
She crossed the room, stopped by his side, stood so their upper arms
just barely touched. Leaned her head in toward his. A brief gesture at
their comrades: "This is going to be fun, don't you think?"
Chalmers glanced at her. "If it goes well," he said.
# # #
After the celebration and dinner, unable to sleep, Maya wandered
through the Ares. All of them had spent time in space before, but never in
anything like the Ares, which was enormous. There was a kind of
penthouse at the front end of the ship, a single tank like a bowsprit, which
rotated in the opposite direction the ship did, so that it held steady. Solar
watch instruments, radio antennas, and all the other equipment which
worked best without rotation were located in this tank, and at the very tip
of it was a bulbous room of transparent plastic, a chamber quickly named
the bubble dome, which provided the crew with a weightless, non-rotating
view of the stars, and a partial view of the great ship behind it.
Maya floated near the window wall of this bubble dome, looking back
at the ship curiously. It had been constructed using space shuttle external
fuel tanks; around the turn of the century NASA and Glavkosmos had
begun attaching small booster rockets to the tanks and pushing them all the
way into orbit. Scores of tanks had been launched this way, then tugged to
work sites and put to use—with them they had built two big space
stations, an L5 station, a lunar orbit station, the first manned Mars vehicle,
and scores of unmanned freighters sent to Mars. So by the time the two
agencies agreed to build the Ares, the use of the tanks had become
routinized, with standard coupling units, interiors, propulsion systems and
so forth; and construction of the big ship had taken less than two years.
It looked like something made from a children's toy set, in which
cylinders were attached at their ends to create more complex shapes—in
this case, eight hexagons of connected cylinders, which they called toruses,
lined up and speared down the middle by a central hub shaft, made of a
cluster of five lines of cylinders. The toruses were connected to the hub
shaft by thin crawl spokes, and the resulting object looked somewhat like a
piece of agricultural machinery, say the arm of a harvester combine, or a
mobile sprinkler unit. Or like eight knobby doughnuts, Maya thought,
toothpicked to a stick. Just the sort of thing a child would appreciate.
The eight toruses had been made from American tanks, and the five
bundled lengths of the central shaft were Russian. Both were about fifty
meters long and ten meters in diameter. Maya floated aimlessly down the
tanks of the hub shaft; it took her a long time, but she was in no hurry. She