"Stanley G. Weinbaum - Valley of Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weinbaum Stanley G)

touch with me, you saps!"

Jarvis and Leroy went through the airlock out to the gray plain. The thin air, still scarcely warmed by the
rising sun, bit flesh and lung like needles, and they gasped with a sense of suffocation. They dropped to a
sitting posture, waiting for their bodies, trained by months in acclimatization chambers back on earth, to
accommodate themselves to the tenuous air. Leroy's face, as always, turned a smothered blue, and Jarvis
heard his own breath rasping and rattling in his throat. But in five minutes, the discomfort passed; they
rose and entered the little auxiliary rocket that rested beside the black hull of the Ares.
The under-jets roared out their fiery atomic blast; dirt and bits of shattered biopods spun away in a cloud
as the rocket rose. Harrison watched the projectile trail its flaming way into the south, then turned back
to his work.

It was four days before he saw the rocket again. Just at evening, as the sun dropped behind the horizon
with the suddenness of a candle falling into the sea, the auxiliary flashed out of the southern heavens,
easing gently down on the flaming wings of the under-jets. Jarvis and Leroy emerged, passed through the
swiftly gathering dusk, and faced him in the light of the Ares. He surveyed the two; Jarvis was tattered
and scratched, but apparently in better condition than Leroy, whose dapperness was completely lost.
The little biologist was pale as the nearer moon that glowed outside; one arm was bandaged in
thermo-skin and his clothes hung in veritable rags. But it was his eyes that struck Harrison most strangely;
to one who lived these many weary days with the diminutive Frenchman, there was something queer
about them. They were frightened, plainly enough, and that was odd, since Leroy was no coward or he'd
never have been one of the four chosen by the Academy for the first Martian expedition. But the fear in
his eyes was more understandable than that other expression, that queer fixity of gaze like one in a trance,
or like a person in an ecstasy. "Like a chap who's seen Heaven and Hell together," Harrison expressed it
to himself. He was yet to discover how right he was.

He assumed a gruffness as the weary pair sat down. "You're a fine looking couple!" he growled. "I
should've known better than to let you wander off alone." He paused. "Is your arm all right, Leroy? Need
any treatment?"

Jarvis answered. "It's all right—just gashed. No danger of infection here, I guess; Leroy says there aren't
any microbes on Mars."

"Well," exploded the Captain, "Let's hear it, then! Your radio reports sounded screwy. 'Escaped from
Paradise!' Huh!"

"I didn't want to give details on the radio," said Jarvis soberly. "You'd have thought we'd gone loony."

"I think so, anyway."

"Moi aussi!" muttered Leroy. "I too!"

"Shall I begin at the beginning?" queried the chemist. "Our early reports were pretty nearly complete." He
stared at Putz, who had come in silently, his face and hands blackened with carbon, and seated himself
beside Harrison.

"At the beginning," the Captain decided.

"Well," began Jarvis, "we got started all right, and flew due south along the meridian of the Ares, same
course I'd followed last week. I was getting used to this narrow horizon, so I didn't feel so much like