Последние тайны СССР – Проект Марс 88 - [15]

Andrey frowned: there were several monuments on the launch site, and the saddest one was erected to 48 soldiers and officers from the launch crew of a regular “Vostok-2M” who were burned alive or later died of burns. The rocket was one of the most reliable ones, but during preparation for launch there was an explosion and fire burst out: about 200 tons of rocket fuel components were burning; it was a real Hell on Earth. The launch crew was surely much larger than 48 persons. The people burning alive, asphyxiating from deadly vapors, oxygen, kerosene and other chemicals, helped each other; officers, sergeants and soldiers, standing in the safe distance, rushed to help their dying comrades, and somebody died while helping…

The rocket engineers performed their military duties, and not only them, until the end, at the cost of their lives. The monument to those perished was erected near the launch pad where it all happened and in a small park by the lake in cosmodrome’s main camp – Mirny.

Though the town was the closest one, they say that the relatives of those who perished were allowed to come and stay to live there, near their deceased sons, husbands and brothers.

And who is this monument to? The sergeant replied: it’s not to a person… There will be a MI-4 helicopter here, it will be installed by 30-year anniversary of the launch site. In the technical and operational unit of our regiment there are two of them, they were written off and now stand almost disassembled. One will be assembled and put here. And the construction battalion builds larger and more serious objects, and it’s less than a kilometer here to our unit…

The surging remembrances of the Earth and the endless greenery of Arkhangelsk taiga disappeared. There was the same reddish-grey, sad and silent Martian landscape around.

The base was almost ready – the living modules were tested many times in the working mode and were now set to function automatically, without participation of any crew members.

It was something like the earthly summer on Mars, and at daytime the temperature in the valley of Marinera reached almost + 2 °C. The samples of the most alluring stones and ground from the planet surface have been collected and packed in sealed containers with reliable biological protection.

In a few days they mounted a mobile drilling rig and in a week drilled several wells with the depth of up to thirty meters within a kilometer range from the rocket.

There is so much to do here for real geologists or miners…

They brought a part of samples into the living module in the cave and gave the others to Marina for preliminary research. The biggest part was loaded into a special unit, the most protected one on MS 88, designed for the samples of Mars which did not seem so mysterious any more.

They worked, or now we can probably say – they lived in a group of just four on a big and empty planet. Just one could not go fishing or picking mushrooms to the forest, and the girls wanted to sunbathe and swim in the sea, or at least in a tiny shallow river.

Once Andrey proposed to embellish the dreary landscape a little bit: Brothers Martians! And what if we draw a four-letter word on the ground with our mars rovers? So that it could be seen from the Earth or some orbital telescope?

Can you imagine that?! A set of several thousand photos arrives to NASA, they start analyzing and studying them, and suddenly they see: FUCK you NASA! The scientist would probably faint – at once or a little later.

Svetka laughed: Andrey, you are not only a space maniac, but also a space rowdy!

Having finished laughing, Sergey said: No! The one who will notice this ”FUCK” will probably be dismissed… He will go to the higher bosses to report, and they will think he is making fun of them! Like he wrote it himself and inserted in the photo!

That’s the way they worked, lived and had fun, alone on the big silent planet.

-11-

The program, envisaged by the project MS 88, was gradually drawing to a close. There was one thing left: a long return to the Earth.

The part of Mars near the spaceship which stood there for too long and entrance to the lava tube where they made the base was now very familiar, but not native or even close. The only place where one wanted to stay for a longer time was the lava tunnel itself.

And it was not the section near the base: the longer went the pair of explorers, the calmer and more peaceful they felt, as if its many-meter thick walls protected not only from the radiation that pierced through Mars and dust storms, but also from something stronger and more ruthless – the time.

Sveta and Marina also liked to wander in it sometimes, not far from the base, and once asked the boys to take them farther, to the places which even Sergey and Andrey did not visit.

The tunnel reminded a little of lava tubes on the Hawaii, but they were real tubes back there! And here it was a huge tunnel, one hundred or sometimes more meters wide. Sometimes it contracted by ten times and became almost a metro tunnel, then it spread into the unknown, on all sides at once.