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

accepting his fate to increase the chances of others? Yes, it seemed a bit like courage, and a bit like
heroism. It impressed Terry Sommers.
His sentiments established a grudging compromise. "I'm an idiot to do this," he grumbled. "But the
finish would be the same anyway."
He hoisted the Venusian to his back, and contrived to strap him in place. The tiny fellow gave a chirp
of anguish, winced, shuddered, and went limp. The pain of movement had sent his mind back into
oblivion. Terry bit his lip to suppress the savage throb in his own wrist.
It took a minute to force an exit from the cabin. Air puffed past him as the door flew open, for the
pressure inside had been greater than that of the planet's half-congealed atmosphere. He strode forth into
a domain that was never meant to be ruled by humans.
From somewhere deep within him a burst of adventurous gayety surged up.
He wasn't an iron man, accustomed to battling the raw conditions of hostile worlds. He was a
trouper, a clown, who, with tricks and jokes and song, had added a little leavening to the hard lives of
colonists scattered throughout the Solar System. Even now, if the accident hadn't happened, he would be
approaching Nadir, the larger city of Pluto, to join up with six others of his profession. "Bits of tawdry
tinsel," an old explorer had once dubbed his kind deprecatingly. Remembering this, Terry Sommers gave
a grim chuckle in which there was a note of defiance.
Spiny cactiform crystals, shimmering with an inner luminescence of their own, were all about him,
breast-high, covering the floor of the crevasse like a thicket of grotesque jewels. They broke with brittle,
tinkling sounds as he forced his way through their ranks. Long, slender, furry parts of them groped
through the gloom, and touched him in a way that was half hungry, half inquisitive. They were neither
plant nor animal nor the inanimate creation of a purely physical process. They lived, and in a dim way
they were intelligent! Yet they were not composed of protoplasm, but of ice, and of liquefied and frozen
gases which on Earth would have been a permanent part of the atmosphere. Their vital processes were
electrical. That much Terry Sommers remembered from the few sketchy accounts he had read of
conditions on Pluto, a world which he had never before visited.
It had seemed fantastic; but Terry realized now that it was not fantastic at all. It was natural. The
outer planets beyond the orbit of Jupiter were too heatless to support fauna and flora whose protoplasm
was similar to that of the fauna and flora of Earth. And so, life, ever adaptable to the conditions imposed
by environment, had taken the form of these frigid monstrosities, beautiful yet abhorrent.

LIFE was a queer thing anyway, difficult to describe. You could say that it was something that grew
and reproduced its kind and made use of some form of energy; but that was about as specific as you
dared be in stating a definition. There were living things on Mercury, Venus, and Mars, quite like those of
Earth.
The moons of Jupiter, however, possessed a form of life that was unique, of which the
microorganisms that produced Sylfane were an example. Crystalline, it was, hard, composed chiefly of
siliceous minerals, indifferent to both heat and cold. And on worlds farther out in the heatless void, these
frosty nightmares were dominant, though on at least one of the moons of Saturn, Terry knew that there
was a vaporous form of life. There were some scientists who argued that even in the inconceivably hot
photosphere of the Sun, a phenomenon might exist which was comparable in many ways to the process
of life on lesser spheres!
Awed at his ruminations, Terry Sommers directed his gaze upward. Above was a ragged ribbon of
sky, between the crests of the deep trench that hemmed him in. Stars dotted its purple depths. Anaemic
sunshine sparkled on the eastern lip of the crevasse.
Terry selected what seemed a favorable place, and started to climb. It was two hundred feet to the
top of the rampart and nearly vertical all the way. Hand and foot holds were plentiful but precarious and
likely to break at any instant. With every upward surge, rime of frozen air showered down upon his
partovac making him look like some fantastic frost imp. The feeble gravity was the trump which made the
ascent possible. Burdened as he was, he still weighed much less than he would have on his native planet.