"James Tiptree Jr. - Second Going" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tiptree James Jr)

Start with First Contact.

First Contact took place on Mars, with the men of the First Mars Mission. The
two who had landed, that is. The command module pilot, Reverend Perry
Danforth, was just flying orbits, looking down and seeing peculiar things.
Meeting them on Mars confused everybody for a while. They were not Martians.

The best account of the meeting is from Mission Control. I found a man who had
been a boy there, sort of a gofer. In that big room with all the
terminals-you've seen it a million times on TV if you watched space stuff. So
this first bit is dictated live by Kevin (Red) Blake, now aged 99.5 years.

But before him I want to say a word about how everything was. So normal.
Nothing sinister or dramatic going on. Like in a ship that's slowly, very
slowly, listing to one side, only nobody's mentioning it. That's all
underneath. But little things give it away, like this one Kevin told me before
they landed.

It was a long trip, see, two years plus. They were all in the command module,
called Mars Eagle. James Aruppa, commanding, and Todd Fiske, and the Reverend
Perry, who wasn't going to get to land. (Personally, I'd have broken Todd's
arm or something, if I'd been Perry, so I could get to land. Imagine getting
so closeand then flying circles for a week while the others are on Mars! But
he acted perfectly happy about it. He even made a joke about being "the most
expensive valet parking service ever." Very cooperative and oneforall, the
Reverend. I never did find out exactly what he was the Reverend of; maybe it
was only a nickname.)

Anyway about five or six months out, at a time when they were supposed to be
fast asleep, they called Mission Control. "Are you all right back there?"

"Sure, everything's nominal here. What's with you?"

Well, it turned out that they'd seen this flash, some trick rock reflection or
something that made a burst of light right where Earth was. And they thought
it was missiles, see, World War III starting . . . anybody would've, in those
days. That's what I mean by the feelings just underneath. But nobody ever said
a gloomy word, on top.

There were other things underneath, of course, different for different people,
all adding up to The End. But this is no place to talk about the old days;
it's all changed now. So that's that, and now here comes Kevin:

"I can remember it like it was yesterday. All morning had been occupied with
the Lander carrying Todd and Jim Aruppa coming down and finding a flat place.
I nearly got thrown out of the control room for sticking my head in people's
way to catch a glimpse of a screen while I was bringing stuff. The amount of
coffee those NASA boys put away! And some of them ate-one man ate seven egg
sandwiches-they were all keyed up like crazy. All right, I'll stick to the
point. I know what you want to hear.