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

most famous people in history. It was an unavoidable, heavy fact; but
Boone seemed to slip out from under it, to leave it around his feet on the
floor. Intent on the taste of a roll, or some news on the table screen, he
never referred to his previous expedition, and if someone brought the
subject up he spoke as if it were no different from any of the flights the rest
of them had taken. But it wasn't so, and only his ease made it seem that
way: at the same table each morning, laughing at Nadia's lame engineering
jokes, making his portion of the talk. After a while it took an effort to see
the aura around him.
Frank Chalmers was more interesting. He always came in late, and
sat by himself, paying attention only to his coffee and the table screen.
After a couple of cups he would talk to people nearby, in ugly but
functional Russian. Most of the breakfast conversations in D hall had now
shifted to English, to accomodate the Americans. The linguistic situation
was a set of egg dolls: English held all hundred of them, inside that was
Russian, and inside that, the languages of the commonwealth, and then the
internationals. Eight people aboard were idiolinguists, a sad kind of
orphaning in Maya's opinion, and it seemed to her they were more Earth-
oriented than the rest, and in frequent communication with people back
home. It was a little strange to have their psychiatrist in that category.
Anyway English was the ship's lingua franca, and at first Maya had
thought that this gave the Americans an advantage. But then she noticed
that when they spoke they were always on stage to everyone, while the rest
of them had more private languages they could switch to if they wanted.
Frank Chalmers was the exception to all that, however. He spoke five
languages, more than anyone else aboard. And he did not fear to use his
Russian, even though it was very bad; he just hacked out questions and
then listened to the answers, with a really piercing intensity, and a quick
startling laugh. He was an unusual American in many ways, Maya
thought. At first he seemed to have all the characteristics, he was big,
loud, maniacally energetic, confident, restless; talkative enough, after that
first coffee; friendly enough. It took a while to notice how he turned the
friendliness on and off, and to notice how little his talk revealed. Maya
never learned a thing about his past, for instance, despite deliberate efforts
to chat him up. It made her curious. He had black hair, a swarthy face,
light hazel eyes—handsome in a tough-guy way—his smile brief, his laugh
sharp, like Maya's mother's. His gaze too was sharp, especially when
looking at Maya; a matter of evaluating the other leader, she assumed. He
acted toward her as if they had an understanding built on long
acquaintance, a presumption which made her uneasy given how little they
had spoken together in Antarctica. She was used to thinking of women as
her allies, and of men as attractive but dangerous problems. So a man who
presumed to be her ally was only the more problematic. And dangerous.
And… something else.
She recalled only one moment when she had seen further into him
than the skin, and that had been back in Antarctica. After the thermal
engineer had cracked and been sent north, news of his replacement had
come down, and when it was announced everyone was quite surprised and
excited to hear that it was going to be John Boone himself, even though he
had certainly received more than the maximum radiation dosage on his