BRADBURY'S SHADOW
František Novotný

The moment Voronov announced the makeup of the rescue team,a fight broke out.“Norton’s my buddy,and we’ve stuck together a good long while,”shouted Björn,shaking with rage in his harness like a just-trapped polar bear.“I’m not going to see some trash from over the Wall go out to save him.That’s what you are,you lousy Commies,”he said,threatening Voronov with his powerful fist,which choked in the tight cuffs of the uniform he wore under his spacesuit,“you always pick bastards from around the Bloc!”
       George Vltava kept quiet and calmly watched the raging Swede, hanging on the cylindrical wall of the butterfly room diagonally beneath him.Or above him?Hard to decide in a place that rotates one hundred and eighty kilometers above the surface of Mars.He kept quiet,even though he was the cause of Björn’s anger.After all,he decided,Demyan was the expedition’s leader,and it was up to him to defend his decisions.He calmly watched how the Swede’s saliva transformed into tiny,perfect grey- white spheres and flew in a cloud across the oldest part of the satellite Sagan allegedly a leftover from some Voschod or Mir and tried to guess its trajectory,that is,which of the men stapled to the opposite wall would get drenched.It would probably be Jacques,the little Canadian guy.
       “You big white pig!”shrieked Jacques;he too clearly saw that he had a shower coming,and from under his fringes of wiry black hair,threw an ugly look at the Scandinavian.“What the hell do you think you’re doing? Who wants to see your spray?”and deliberately spit back at Björn.
       As if that were the signal everybody had been waiting for,the butterfly room began ringing with shouts across all four meters of its diameter. Björn bellowed like a bison,how he would kill that Canadian shrimp,then others railed against him,and then Jacques’enemies against Jacques. Everybody shouted but Voronov and Vltava,who kept completely silent. The atmosphere clouded with whirling dust and multiplying drops of spit, and more and more balls of foam cut through this nebula,as more and more men simply started spitting.Vltava,protecting his face against the sticky rain,watched Arnold Kuntz with interest,as Kuntz,with a wicked smile,took turns spitting for Jacques,then Björn.He was a good shot.
       The Areolog II geological expedition had lasted too long.After six months of getting there,the participants roamed seven more months in tanks or walked,hidden deep inside sherpas,over the barren plains of Mars,looked for and sometimes even found mineral veins and deposits, underground lakes or water sources,and set the deck computers to draw their maps,all the while surrounded by murderous cold and by an atmosphere that most resembled a botched attempt at a vacuum.For more than seven months they had been destroying their lungs with iron-flavored oxygen,dreaming in vain of baths,wiping their sweat and other body gunk with wads of cotton dipped in alcohol,and for their bodily needs, strapping on disgusting machines resembling medieval torture devices. They were fed up with everything,including each other.Sick hatreds and attractions had formed between them,racial and national prejudices had come to light,and long-buried political injustices had been dug from their graves.
       And just at the moment when all teams but one had been brought up from the surface,when everybody looked forward like little children to their return,to the arrival of the transport planetship,Keimi Ratanen from Lapland announced the disappearance of his partner,the American representative of the expedition’s commander.These two,the most capable psychics,formed the last unevacuated team.
       The Mariner Canyons.The strangest formation on Mars.Norton had probably found something there.Or something had found him,the crazy thought occurred to Vltava.And that really must be where he went.Why else would Demyan have asked Voronov for an extra week and asked Keimi instead of Björn to go with him?Even that Lapland shaman must have suspected something;he had hesitated and spent a long time cleaning and oiling that laughable rifle he carried everywhere,even though it was almost worthless in the cold below.And besides,there was nothing,absolutely nothing,to shoot at down there.Funny boy,that Ratanen.
       The couple’s term ended tomorrow;within eighteen hours they were to join the others,killing time by sorting materials for sixty-five more hours until the “Skytrain”arrived.They already had a direct radio contact with the planetship.But terrified Ratanen had contacted the crew instead. Norton had,Ratanen said,gotten lost fifteen hours earlier in Tithion Canyon.“Fossilized air swallowed him”,Ratanen had announced by radio. Ratanen confirmed that he had oxygen for six more hours,but refused to go hunting Norton alone.Would someone please come to help;he was afraid to go on his own…
       What could Keimi be so afraid of,Keimi the reindeer herdsman,tied to nature like nobody else in the expedition,Keimi the hunter who had not only shot a good number of wolves,but also polar bears,since he was one of the experts who had helped put an end to their invasion of North Norway,when the impertinent and overabundant beasts had realized it was easier to live on garbage from the cities than to hunt seals in the icy North Sea.His whole being was perfectly attuned to nature;this was,in..........

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