"Raymond Z. Gallun - Blue Haze on Pluto" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gallun Raymond Z)

Blue Haze on Pluto
by Raymond Z. Gallun

IT WASN'T TRUE. It couldn't be true! Misfortunes cameтАФyesтАФbut never in such a damnable knot
of coincidences. It was ghastly, unreal, unnatural. He must have imagined this. Terry Sommers touched
his forehead with his one good hand, finding, there, under the partovac mask he wore, the thick bruise
that had stunned him. He glanced about, his eyes puzzled and vexed behind his goggles. Somewhere
there must be a reassuring rift in the illusion.
No, it was real all right. Here he was, in the cabin of the space liner, or rather, in what remained of
the cabin. The evidence was before him, around him, beating undeniably into his senses. The coachlike
interior was a shambles. He saw twisted girders, crumpled plush, and human bodies that would move no
more. Beyond the ports stark ramparts loomed, for the ship had fallen into a deep crevasse where it
might not be discovered for months, even though a party would, of course, be ordered out to search for
it.
Steep crags, part ice, part frozen atmosphere, reared up in the purple gloom that was daylight on
Pluto. Ghoulish forms composed of the same substances, jagged, furry, somehow alive, shining with a
phosphorescence of their own, were clustered on the floor and sides of the crevasse. The air of the cabin
glittered with frost crystals, for the cold of this outermost child of the Sun was seeping into the battered
hull. Terry Sommers could almost feel it nipping at his flesh, even through his partovac attire. The stillness
mingled oppressively with the ache in his broken wrist, and the specks of color that danced before his
vision.
He watched the glow fade from an illuminator that hung askew from the warped wall. It was a pretty
little thing of tooled bronze, fitted with a pink shade. That illuminator was a symbol, somehow, of the
luxuries of civilizationтАФluxuries that were only a step from death.
He glanced dazedly down at the belt of stout webbing that had held him in his seat. He recalled the
explosion in the machinery of the craft, and the eerie whine that had followed. Then the steward had
announced calmly that the twelve passengers must prepare for a crash. They had scrambled into their
partovacs, the thick fabric and vacuum compartments of which might at least be expected to shield them
for a short time from the bitter Plutonian climate.
The concussion of the fall, an instant before he had been stunned, still thudded gratingly in Terry's
mind. Yes, it had all happened! He was stranded without hope of succor in a frigid hell of which he knew
almost nothing. In thirty minutes it would be night. Just a few hours more, and the cold that came with
darkness would get him even here in the ship. That he had not perished in the accident was mockery.
Nor was it his position alone that troubled him. There was something else that he remembered;
something that perhaps wasn't his business, since he was only a passenger. But it impressed him now as
the crowning misfortune of a series of disastrous coincidences.
An hour or two ago, the man who had occupied the seat just ahead had told him about a mission. In
Pindar, the smaller of the two Terrestrial settlements of Pluto, a plague was raging. Sylfane, it was called,
Ganymedean in origin. The disease was produced by a siliceous microorganism, entirely different from
anything of the kind known on Earth. It absorbed the water from the system of any plant or animal it
attacked. More than once Sylfane had been described as the deadliest pest in the Solar System.

TERRY SOMMERS knew what the plague was like, for he had seen cases of it before, during his
wanderings on a dozen spheres as a member of various itinerant vaudeville troupes. In five hours' time a
human being fairly withered up before one's eyes! In his memory there was a picture of a girl who had
succumbed to the dread affliction. With death around him now, it was easy for Terry to grasp the reality
of death out there in that lonely settlementтАФso easy that, after a moment, a kind of blurred panic
possessed him.
 Savagely he tore the fastenings of his safety belt loose, and stumbled erect. His sound hand,
thick-gloved, moved forward, grasping the shoulder of the man in the seat ahead of him, who had told