Последние тайны СССР – Проект Марс 88 - [14]

This sad picture reminded of a planetary cemetery, where the graves disappeared a long time ago: emptiness, silence, dust, stones and nothing else…

There was also a feeling that a huge fire destroyed everything here, only something that could not burn was left.

They desperately felt like flying away from here at once. They were strange or odd here, nobody had been waiting for them there for a long time, or maybe somebody waited, but they could not fly then because they themselves were not on Earth at that time.

The base was built several kilometers from the place of landing, on the huge valley of Marinera, almost five thousand kilometers long. Though the mobile living module created something like the magnetic field of the Earth, a cave or a lava tunnel had to be found to protect the base from space radiation, solar wind and long and heavy dust storms.

Having spent almost a week on traveling along big and small canyons, Sergey found an ideal smooth and spacious cave in the winding lava tunnel which began in some unknown place.

It took ten runs and a column of two mars rovers with trailers to transport all the modules and equipment for the future Martian base. Mars rovers moved easily, leaving a veil of nasty dust after them. The dust was much finer than on Earth and reminded of reddish-grey flour of oriental spices, and it was nasty because of its size: it was found even in the places where it should not have been…

Force of gravity… well, this could hardly be called a force as it was three times less powerful than on Earth. But for this reason heavy containers with equipment and outfit were pulled into the cave with unusual easiness.

Heavy protective spacesuits became almost weightless, without them one could probably fly over Mars like birds above the Earth, if it weren’t for the rest of local “delights” which were deathful for humans.

Even though it was easier to work, they got much more tired than on Earth or on board the spaceship. Having returned from the last run from the base to MS 88, having been cleaned from dust as thoroughly as possible in the pre-airlock chamber, and finally having got rid of the spacesuit which tired one out during the day and breathed the almost real air, Andrey and Sergey used their last efforts to take a shower of damp reusable napkins, had a quick meal and went to bed.

Having dumped half of the cave with modules and containers, they started to work by turns. The technology of assembling was worked out back on Earth: the construction reminded of several huge tourist tents with a complicated frame, connected with small lock tunnels between themselves.

The material consisted of many layers with cellular structure and somehow reminded of light and flexible armor…

The MS-88 spaceship itself stood not far from the edge of the canyon, the magnetic field, combined with numerous technologies of Russian military rockets, made it practically invisible both from the Earth and from most orbital and space telescopes.

They could see their rocket through a unique color filter integrated into the helmet in the suit of each person – each “Martian”, but not farther than a couple of kilometers from it.

Among the dead and oppressive silence of the Red Planet, the spaceship on its surface sometimes seemed a sort of a monument.

When Andrey looked at it, he suddenly remembered the other monuments on the launch site:

Back on Earth, he often went to the object “Pero” (“Feather”) to accept elements of the outfit for MS-88. In those times, the roads in that part of the launch site were even better than in Moscow.

The object itself was quite an ordinary military airfield. Why was it called in such an interesting way? Because it could not accept all kinds of planes, especially heavy ones, so it was light like a feather, hence the name. It had just one runway… Why should it have two or more, like large civil ones?

On the whole, servicemen liked to give beautiful, sometimes mysterious names to different objects, weapons, separate blocks and devices.

One of the radars was called “Storm”, different types of radio stations were called after flowers or plants: “Acacia” or “Birch”, and there were hundreds or even thousands of these beautiful names…

The road was stretching along the same huge Archangelsk taiga. Near a small fork it went to the right, and then it was ideally straight right to the airfield.

Sometimes, in the green triangle between the roads with no asphalt on it, Andrey noticed soldiers digging something.

There was a lot of work, and a great deal of constructing or digging was done on the launch site itself.

Once he was overcome by curiosity and stopped. About 5 soldiers were digging in quite a deep square trench, several soldiers stood on the surface smoking. Everybody had blue shoulder straps and blue tabs with stylized propellers on them.

Andrey came out and greeted them not exactly according to the regulations: Hello, military men! Hey, pilots, and why are you digging when there is a large construction battalion? The pilots with spades tried to salute, but Andrey waved his hand, as if saying: we are not on the drill field…The sergeant without a spade– the diggers’ commander – said: Well, Major, there will be a monument here.