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[heft] Perry Rhodan Neo 006 D Borsch, Frank
Clifton, Mark und Riley, Frank Computer der Unsterblichkeit (H
American Fairy Tales L. Frank Baum
Casa capitular Dune Frank Herbert
Baum Frank W krainie czarnoksieznika Oza i
Dokter.Powes.vlucht.Frank.G.Sla
Czar milosci Dorotea Benton Frank
Chapterhouse, Dune Frank Herbert
Duin.Messias.Frank.Herbert
Cate Campbell Beatty Donor 23 (epub)

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.The Martian horizon swayed across the port as he swung the ship into a shrinking orbit around the planet.He took her round three times before velocity, angle of declination and nature of terrain were all just right.The vessel belly-skidded along a flatland that was not red but gray-green with a thick carpet of lichens.The tail-end roar ceased for the first time in many, many days.This was it, the hour of victory, the long step toward the Asteroid Belt, the Outer Planets, another solar system, an endless, uncountable multitude of worlds.Yet he did not howl with the glory of it, jump around, wave flags, sing songs.He lounged in his seat, sweating and exhausted.Now was the moment that would inscribe his name in history books in letters of gold but like all such moments it proved strangely matter-of-fact, humdrum, lacking in great thrill.The reaction, of course, following a long period of intense nervous strain.The aftermath.A few minutes crawled by before he recovered and stood up for a better look through the port.He gazed with sleepy-eyed lack of comprehension at a dark circle across the lichens, the shadow of something huge and round standing alongside his ship.His ears were equally reluctant to register when they heard an authoritative hammering upon the airlock door.-The control-cabin's ports permitted a field of view covering a fraction less than one-eighty degrees.There were no other vantage points from which to look around, no side-pOrts, no vision possible from the tail.He could stand by the instrument-board and survey a great sweep of alien territory that included nothing alongside or behind the ship.To see the rest he must blow the steering-jets lengthily and with enough power to edge the vessel around, wasting precious fuel and risking serious damage to the armourplate shell.Seven hundred tons grinding through an arc of ninety degrees would be more than enough to tear the belly-skids from the body.Alternatively he could go out through the airlock and take a look in person.He'd intended to do that very soon.If all had gone as planned he'd have donned a closed-circuit oxygen mask, taken a colour-plate camera with him, set the instrument on its tripod and made a record of himself posing by the ship.The picture of the year if not of the century.But all had not gone as planned.The veteran advisers of Lunar and Venusian expeditions had no cause to expect what was taking place right now.They had provided instructions and advice, food, water, drugs, oxygen, signalling apparatus, instruments, weapons, every possible scientific contribution toward survival and success.The one thing not provided was a safe way of answering the door when somebody—or some thing—knocks.What's the answer to that? There are two and only two.Open the door and take a chance.Or stay in and sit tight, perhaps for ever.Knock, knock!Could it be a wind-stirred branch belonging to an adjacent tree? Not likely.He had seen no tree when skidding across the lichens.There wasn't a tree in sight from here to the horizon.Nothing but the gray-green sward and, far away on the skyline, a huge, ragged outcrop of red rock.What else? Metallic pebbles leaping into the ship's magnetic field? No, the rapping was too deliberate and methodical for that.It sounded exactly like the summons of an imperative hand—in a vast desert where there was no hand.Knock, knock!The round shadow remained upon the lichens without moving or changing form.No other shadows extruded from its rim.Nothing stirred on the landscape, nothing winged through thin air, no bizarre figure advanced over the skyline.Mars was a dead world exactly as astronomers had declared.Knock, knock!He could not stand it any longer.The risks involved in getting here were more numerous and deadly than the danger of opening the door to an unknown caller.He had survived the former.Surely he could meet and beat the latter.Nothing ventured, nothing gamed.He who hesitates is lost.And so on [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]