Sleepers Of Mars
- Автор: Уиндем Джон Паркс Лукас Бейнон Харрис
- Год: 1977
- Язык: английский
- Год: Coronet Books/Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
- ISBN: 0340173262
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Sleepers Of Mars». Краткое содержание книги:
Of course, we are now well used to the idea of Man On The Moon, we have become blasé as to the possibilities of inter-planetary travel. But imagine two expeditions to Mars, one British, the other Russian, both in the process of discovering a mechanical race, invented and produced by the Martians as they believe their specie to be dying.
The other four novellas in this collection give further evidence of John Wyndham’s genius at invention, characterisation and sense of movement.
It had been necessary not only to raise them from their prone positions to the perpendicular, a matter of sheer force, but there was now in progress the far more ticklish job of jacking them up and adjusting them so that the correct inclination was meticulously attained. And this precise alignment, so that the take-off performed at the exact second of a given minute should set them on the right course for Earth, was proving a matter of more difficulty with the four-flanged Russian rocket than with the tripod-supported English ship.
Nevertheless, the work was proceeding with more dispatch than the rockets’ owners could have contrived, since the metallic workers, being themselves machines of precision, could dispense with much of the wearisome calculation which the men from Earth must have found necessary.
The men who had made this leap of over 35,000,000 miles across space had had the opportunity to do little more than scratch a bare acquaintance with the foreign planet. The English rocket, the Gloria Mundi, under the command of that spectacular and much-publicised rocket-plane racer, Dale Curtance (remember the song, ‘Curty, the King of the Clouds’?), had arrived first. After landing at the spot where the rocket now stood, they had set out upon what was intended as a brief preliminary exploration as far as the banks of the near-by canal.
It had turned out to be their only expedition—and not so brief, at that. On their return, as they broke out of the scrawny canal-zone bushes on to the reddish sand, they had found their return barred by a horde of mechanical monstrosities with clearly hostile intentions. In the course of a half-night that they spent beleaguered on a sandhill, it had begun to appear that those hostile intentions would be successful by reason of the men’s air or ammunition—or both—giving out.
It was the arrival of the Russian rocket which had raised the siege by scattering the weird machines in flight across the desert. The men from the Gloria Mundi had lost no time in taking the chance to regain their own ship.
Later, the Russians had a similar experience. Karaminoff, Comrade-Commander, had set out accompanied by five of his crew. The two others—Gordonov, the engineer, and Zhatkin, the navigating mathematician, a small, dreamy-eyed, oriental-looking man from Kirghiz—he had left in charge of the Tovaritch.
Karaminoff’s first objective had been a visit to the other rocket. His brief interview there with Curtance was unsatisfactory to all concerned, and the affair ended in a mishap which reduced his party to four. Karaminoff had been in the act of exchanging a red flag with the hammer-and-sickle upon it for the Union Jack which the British had planted, in the ingenuous belief that its erection gave them jurisdiction over the entire planet, when an angry young man without even a respirator broke from the Gloria Mundi’s airlock and fired a pistol wildly in his direction.
Luckily, the damage was not serious; the bullet had taken Mikletski, the biologist, in the flesh of his right arm. Comrade Vassiloff, second-in-command of the Tovaritch, had turned swiftly, and by a lucky shot disabled the young man before he could do further damage. The latter had fallen back into the airlock and managed to pull the outer door shut behind him.
It was a misfortune, but little more than that. Real trouble came to the Russians later.
Comrade-Commander Karaminoff, unwilling to be burdened with a partially-disabled man, sent him back in company with the doctor, Platavinov, to have the wound dressed while he himself went on with three companions, Vassiloff, Vinski and Steinoi, to investigate the source of an agitation in the bushes more than a mile away.
What he had expected to find in those dry, crackling thickets he had no very clear idea, but it was certainly not the things which emerged to meet him.
The whole party stopped dead and stared as a string of machines clanked and clattered towards them. The cases which held the mechanisms were of many shapes—cubical, spherical, ovoid, pyramidal, rhomboidal and forms unnamed. None stood much higher than a man, and some considerably lower. They moved over the sand by means of stilts, skids, joined or unjoined legs—anything but wheels. Many of the appendages were odd, unmatched and grotesquely inappropriate to the designs of the machines which drove them.
The four amazed men hesitated, and then began to retreat. But before they had covered a quarter of the distance back to their ship another band of mechanical monstrosities had raced to cut off their retreat, and they found themselves beleaguered as the English party had been before them.
The situation was unpleasant, nor did it improve. Accurate firing at the machines’ lenses could put them out of action, but the Russians had only a few dozen rounds between them, and it was not by any means every shot that told. After being repulsed twice with several casualties, the machines settled down to wait as though they had all the time in Mars at their disposal—which, indeed, they seemed to have, and which the men certainly had not.
But for the present it appeared there was little to be done about it: precious ammunition must not be wasted, and it would be futile as well as foolhardy to do anything which would bring them within range of the metal tentacles or the jointed arms of the mechanical travesties.
Vinski broke open the small reflex camera he was carrying, and with the mirror from its interior, heliographed to the Tovaritch. The answer blinked back by the searchlight was not encouraging.
Mikletski and Platavinov had also been cut off, but were at present holding out against a small band of the mechanical monsters; the other two were now bottled up in the rocket-ship with a group of similar uncouth machines waiting patiently round the airlock. Vinski turned his attention to the Gloria Mundi and signalled her in English, only to learn that she too was in a state of siege.
The day wore on with only an occasional exchange of messages to relieve the monotony. For six hours the Russians lay in the sunlight which streamed down from the strange, purplish sky, ringed round by the fantastic metal contraptions. They played a waiting game, knowing full well that it was their opponents’ strength, but unable to form any practicable plan. At the end of the sixth hour another message winked from the Gloria Mundi.
‘How long will your aid hold out?’
Vinski glanced at the meter on his oxygen tank and made a rapid calculation.
‘About eight hours,’ he flashed back.
It was a grim prospect. Once the tanks were finished, it would be a matter of just a few minutes. No human lungs had the capacity to win the necessary amount of oxygen from the thin Martian air. Unless something was done they would have to choose between a gasping death some time during the night and a suicidal rush at the guarding machines.
After a pause the signal light from the Gloria Mundi began again:
‘Are going to make grenades,’ Vinski read. ‘Tell your ship-‘ Then the message ceased, mysteriously.
A few minutes later Vinski’s intent gaze was diverted from the rocket. Over the flank of a sandhill, a little to the right of it, poured a stream of the crazy machines. Moving at full speed they looked even more incredible than at rest.
As they lumbered and lurched along the truly imbecilic qualities of their designs were enhanced. But for the fact that his companions were with him, Vinski would have doubted his senses. Abruptly he became aware that the machines closer at hand had also caught this urge to move. As though at a signal their loose joints clattered, and in a moment they were sweeping down upon him.