"John Varley - In the Hall of the Martian Kings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

Crawford nodded. He looked around at the other occupants of the room. There was the Surface
Mission Commander, Mary Lang, the black woman he had seen inside the dome just before the
blowout. She was sitting on the edge of Lou Prager's cot, her head cradled in her hands. In a way, she
was a more shocking sight than Lou. No one who knew her would have thought she could be brought to
this limp state of apathy. She had not moved for the last hour.

Sitting on the floor huddled in a blanket was Martin Ralston, the chemist. His shirt was bloody, and there
was

114 JohnVarley

dried blood all over his face and hands from the nosebleed he'd only recently gotten under control, but
his eyes were alert. He shivered, looking from Lang, his titular leader, to Crawford, the only one who
seemed calm enough to deal with anything. He was a follower, reliable but unimaginative.

Crawford looked back to the newest arrivals. They were Lucy Stone McKillian, the redheaded
ecologist, and Song Sue Lee, the exobiologist. They still stood numbly by the air lock, unable as yet to
come to grips with the fact of fifteen dead men and women beneath the dome outside.

"What do they say on the Burroughs'?" McKillian asked, tossing her helmet on the floor and squatting
tiredly against the wall. The lander was not the most comfortable place to hold a meeting; all the couches
were mounted horizontally since their purpose was cushioning the acceleration of landing and takeoff.
With the ship sitting on its tail, this made ninety percent of the space in the lander useless. They were all
gathered on the circular bulkhead at the rear of the life system, just forward of the fuel tank.

"We're waiting for a reply," Crawford said. "But I can sum up what they're going to say: not good. Unless
one of you two has some experience in Mars-lander handling that you've been concealing from us."

Neither of them bothered to answer that. The radio in the nose sputtered, then clanged for their attention.
Crawford looked over at Lang, who made no move to go answer it. He stood and swarmed up the
ladder to sit in the copilot's chair. He switched on the receiver.

"Commander Lang?"

"No, this is Crawford again. Commander Lang is ... indisposed. She's busy with Lou, trying to do
something."

"That's no use. The doctor says it's a miracle he's still breathing. If he wakes up at all, he won't be
anything like you knew him. The telemetry shows nothing like the normal brain wave. Now I've got to
talk to Commander Lang. Have her come up." The voice of Mission Commander Weinstein was
accustomed to command, and about as emotional as a weather report.

In the Hall of the Martian Kings 115

"Sir, I'll ask her, but I don't think she'll come. This is still her operation, you know." He didn't give
Weinstein time to reply to that. Weinstein had been trapped by his own seniority into commanding the
Edgar Rice Burroughs, the orbital ship that got them to Mars and had been intended to get them back.
Command of the Podkayne, the disposable lander that would make the lion's share of the headlines, had
gone to Lang. There was little friendship between the two, especially when Weinstein fell to brooding
about the very real financial benefits Lang stood to reap by being the first woman on Mars, rather than