"Baxter, Stephen - Huddle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

...The air was hot.

He stopped, stunned by this realization.

With renewed excitement, he lodged his stubby fingers in crevices in the rock,
and hauled himself upward.

At last the gully grew narrower.

He reached the top and dragged himself up over the edge, panting, fur steaming.

... There were no people here.

He was standing at the rim of a great bowl cut into the hard black rock. And at
the base of the bowl was a red liquid, bubbling slowly. Steam gathered in great
clouds over the bubbling pool, laced with yellowish fumes that stank strongly.
It was a place of rock and gas, not of people.

Frazil came to stand beside him. She was breathing hard, and her mouth was wide
open, her arms spread wide, to shed heat.

They stood before the bowl of heat, drawn by some ancient imperative to the
warmth, and yet repelled by its suffocating thickness.

"The Collision," she said.

"What?"

"Once, the whole world was covered with such pools. Rock, melted by the great
heat of the Collision."

"The Collision is just a story, you said."

She grunted. "I've been wrong before."

His disappointment was crushing. "Nobody could live here. There is warmth, but
it is poisonous." He found it hard even to think, so huge was his sense of
failure.

He stood away from the others and looked around.

Back the way they had come, the uniform hard blackness was broken only by
scattered islands of gray-white: ice pools, Night-Dawn knew, like the one he had
left behind.

Turning, he could see the sweep of the mountains clearly: he was breaching a
great inward-curving wall, a great complex string of peaks that spread from
horizon to horizon, gaunt under the blue-purple sky.

And ahead of him, ice had gathered in pools and crevasses at the feet of the