The Martian Chronicles / Марсианские хроники. Рэй БрэдбериЧитать онлайн книгу.
rel="nofollow" href="#n_31" type="note">[31] up there, and Captain York and Captain Williams had just never bothered to come back. Now were they going to open the gate and let him in to board the Third Expeditionary Rocket, or was he going to have to kick it down?
They told him to shut up.
He saw the men walking out to the rocket.
Wait for me! he cried. Don't leave me here on this terrible world, I've got to get away; there's going to be an atom war! Don't leave me on Earth!
They dragged him, struggling, away. They slammed the police wagon door and drove him off into the early morning, his face pressed to the rear window, and just before they moved over a hill, he saw the red fire and heard the big sound and felt the huge tremor as the silver rocket shot up and left him behind on an ordinary Monday morning on the ordinary planet Earth.
April 2000: The Third Expedition
The ship came down from space. It came from the stars. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and men in its metal cells. In it were seventeen men, including a captain. The crowd at the Ohio field had shouted and waved their hands up into the sunlight, and the rocket had bloomed out great flowers of heat and color and run away into space on the third voyage to Mars!
Now it was in the upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a thing of beauty and strength. The men within it had been battered, sickened, made well again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars swing up under them.
“Mars!” cried Navigator Lustig.
“Good old Mars!” said Samuel Hinkston, archaeologist.
“Well,” said Captain John Black.
The rocket landed on a lawn of green grass. Outside, upon this lawn, stood an iron deer. Further up on the green stood a tall brown Victorian house, quiet in the sunlight, its windows made of blue and pink and yellow and green colored glass. Upon the porch were geraniums and an old swing which was hooked into the porch ceiling and which now swung back and forth, back and forth, in a little breeze. Through the front window you could see a piece of music titled “Beautiful Ohio” sitting on the music rest.
Around the rocket in four directions spread the little town, green and motionless in the Martian spring. There were white houses and red brick ones, and tall elm trees blowing in the wind, and tall maples and horse chestnuts. And church steeples with golden bells.
The rocket men looked out and saw this. Then they looked at one another and then they looked out again. They held to each other's elbows, suddenly unable to breathe. Their faces grew pale.
“I'll be damned[32],” whispered Lustig, rubbing his face with his numb fingers. “I'll be damned.”
“It just can't be,” said Samuel Hinkston.
“Lord[33],” said Captain John Black.
There was a call from the chemist. “Sir, the atmosphere is thin for breathing. But there's enough oxygen. It's safe.”
“Then we'll go out,” said Lustig.
“Hold on,” said Captain John Black. “How do we know what this is?”
“It's a small town with thin but breathable air in it, sir.”
“And it's a small town the like of Earth towns,” said Hinkston, the archaeologist. “Incredible. It can't be, but it is.”
Captain John Black looked at him. “Do you think that the civilizations of two planets can progress at the same rate and evolve in the same way, Hinkston?”
“I wouldn't have thought so, sir.”
Captain Black stood by the port. “Look out there. The geraniums. A specialized plant. That specific variety has only been known on Earth for fifty years. Then tell me if it is logical that the Martians should have: one, an instrument that looks like a piano and probably is a piano; two, porch swings; and three, if you look closely through this telescopic lens here, is it logical that a Martian composer would have published a piece of music titled, strangely enough, 'Beautiful Ohio'? All of which means that we have an Ohio River on Mars!”
“Captain Williams, of course!” cried Hinkston.
“What?”
“Captain Williams and his crew of three men! Or Nathaniel York and his partner. That would explain it!”
“That would explain absolutely nothing. As far as we know, the York expedition exploded the day it reached Mars, killing York and his partner. As for Williams and his three men, their ship exploded the second day after their arrival. At least the pulsations from their radios stopped at that time, so we figure that if the men were alive after that they'd have contacted us. And anyway, the York expedition was only a year ago, while Captain Williams and his men landed here some time during last August. Theorizing[34] that they are still alive, could they, even with the help of a brilliant Martian race, have built such a town as this and aged it in so short a time? Look at that town out there; why, it's been standing here for the last seventy years. No, this isn't York's work or Williams'. It's something else. I don't like it. And I'm not leaving the ship until I know what it is.”
“For that matter[35],” said Lustig, nodding, “Williams and his men, as well as York, landed on the opposite side of Mars. We were very careful to land on this side.”
“Quite right. Just in case a hostile local tribe of Martians killed off York and Williams, we have instructions to land in a further region, to avoid such a disaster. So here we are, as far as we know, in a land that Williams and York never saw.”
“Damn it,” said Hinkston, “I want to get out into this town, sir, with your permission. It may be there are similar civilizations on every planet in our sun system. We may be on the threshold of the greatest psychological and metaphysical discovery of our age!”
“I'm willing to wait a moment,” said Captain John Black.
“It may be, sir, that we're looking upon a phenomenon that, for the first time, would absolutely prove the existence of God, sir.”
“There are many people who believe in God without such proof, Mr. Hinkston.”
“I'm one myself, sir. But certainly a town like this could not occur without divine intervention. The detail. It fills me with such feelings that I don't know whether to laugh or cry.”
“Do neither, then, until we know what we're up against[36].”
“Up against?” Lustig broke in. “Against nothing, Captain. It's a good, quiet green town, a lot like the old- fashioned one I was born in. I like the looks of it.”
“When were you born, Lustig?”
“Nineteen-fifty, sir.”
“And you, Hinkston?”
“Nineteen fifty-five, sir. Grinnell, Iowa. And this looks like home to me.”
“Hinkston, Lustig, I could be either of your fathers. I'm just eighty years old. Born in 1920 in Illinois, and thanks to God and a science that, in the last fifty years, knows how to make some old men young again, here I am on Mars, not any more tired than the rest of you, but more suspicious. This town out here looks very peaceful and cool, and so much like Green Bluff, Illinois, that it frightens me. It's too much like Green Bluff.” He turned to the radioman. “Radio Earth. Tell them we've landed. That's all. Tell them we'll radio a full report tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
Captain Black looked out the rocket port with his face that should have been the face of a man of eighty but seemed like the face of a man in his fortieth year. “Tell you what we'll do, Lustig; you and I and Hinkston'll look the town over. The other men'll stay
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