"Joan D. Vinge - Voices From the Dust" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Joan D)

VOICES FROM THE DUST
By Joan D. Vinge
Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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4:30. 4:30 in the morning. 4:30 and fifteen Martian sec-onds…Petra Greenfeld picked
up the wood-grained elec-tric clock and shook it. Hurry up! Hurry up ... or else
stop. She set it down on the desk again, too hard in the low gravity, and rubbed her
eyes. To think I’ve been up all night, and there isn’t even a man in my room. I
really must be crazy. She laughed, weakly. How can I be crazy and have a sense of
the absurd?

But then why was she sitting here, if she wasn’t crazy? Why had she been
sitting here all night, like someone con-demned, waiting for the dawn? Why wasn’t
she asleep in her bed like any normal human being—? She swiveled her chair to look
at the rumpled sleeping bag on the cot. Because when she slept the pull was
stronger, it pried open her dreams and painted the walls of her mind with the red
walls of the Valley, and led her, again and again, to an unknown destination. . . .

“Oh, stop it.” She shut her eyes, and turned back to the desk. She wasn’t
obsessed; she was just upset. Why shouldn’t she be upset—that damned Mitradati!
Her fist tightened on the graffiti-covered blotter. That egotistical tin god. So he was
sending her back to “civilization” today, was he? So her poor, frail little mind needed
a rest, did it? Just wait until she got back to Little Earth and made her complaint.
They’d let her conduct her investigation without interference, they’d see that her
judgments weren’t irrational. And that narrow-minded apeman could go suck an
egg…Better yet, why couldn’t she take one of the buggies, and go to the place first?
She’d find her proof, she knew where to look, exactly where—

She got up from her chair, shaking her head, and began to move restlessly
around the small room. Think about some-thing else, anything else…My God, am I
really losing my mind? This isn’t normal. Maybe it would be best to get away from
here, for a while; from Mitradati, from—the artifact. She hadn’t been up to the pole
in weeks, hadn’t seen a movie, or had a decent dinner, or called Fred. And stuck
here with this baker’s half-dozen of impossible—No. She couldn’t really blame
them. Who had been more impossible than she had, these past two weeks?

She looked over at Elke’s unused bed, under the curve where the ceiling
became the outer wall. Elke had been sleeping with Sergei lately, and she suspected it
was as much from uneasiness about her as it was from passion. At least Elke was
sympathetic, and supportive…but Elke was a meteorologist, not a geologist, and
what did she know? And Sergei, with his damned Russian obsession about
parapsy-chology; making the whole idea sound like something out of a Grade Z
science fiction movie. She was glad he had Elke to distract him, before his endless
prying curiosity made her do something she would regret.

She saw the cigarettes and lighter Elke had left on the stool by her cot. She
picked up the pack mindlessly, took out a cigarette, lit it, inhaled—and, coughing
disgustedly, ground it out with her slipper on the cold metal floor. At least I haven’t