"Tom Godwin - The Cold Equations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Godwin Tom)

scrambled up again, her left knee half numb, and turned to retrieve it.
The Gern guard was already upon her, his blaster still in his hand. "Out from the shipтАФfaster."
The barrel of his blaster lashed across the side of her head. "Move onтАФmove on!"
She staggered in a blinding blaze of pain and then hurried on, holding tight to Billy's hand, the wind
cutting like knives of ice through her thin clothes and blood running in a trickle down her cheek.
"He hit you," Billy said. "He hurt you." Then he called the Gern a name that five-year-old boys were
not supposed to know, with a savagery that five-year-old boys were not supposed to possess.
When she stopped at the outer fringe of Rejects she saw that all of them were out of the cruiser and
the guards were going back into it. A half mile down the valley the other cruiser stood, the Rejects out
from it and its boarding ramps already withdrawn.
When she had buttoned Billy's blouse tighter and wiped the blood from her face the first blast of the
drives came from the farther cruiser. The nearer one blasted a moment later and they lifted together, their
roaring filling the valley. They climbed faster and faster, dwindling as they went. Then they disappeared in
the black sky, their roaring faded away, and there was left only the moaning of the wind around her and
somewhere a child crying.
 And somewhere a voice asking, "Where are we? In the name of GodтАФwhat have they done to us?"
She looked at the snow streaming from the ragged hills, felt the hard pull of the gravity, and knew
where they were. They were on Ragnarok, the hell-world of 1.5 gravity and fierce beasts and raging
fevers where men could not survive. The name came from an old Teutonic myth and meant: The last day
for gods and men. The Dunbar Expedition had discovered Ragnarok and her father had told her of it, of
how it had killed six of the eight men who had left the ship and would have killed all of them if they had
remained any longer.
She knew where they were and she knew the Gerns had lied to them and would never send a ship to
take them to Earth. Their abandonment there had been intended as a death sentence for all of them.
And Dale was gone and she and Billy would die helpless and alone . . .
"It will be darkтАФso soon." Billy's voice shook with the cold. "If Daddy can't find us in the dark, what
will we do?"
"I don't know," she said. "There's no one to help us and how can I knowтАФwhat we should doтАФ"
She was from the city. How could she know what to do on an alien, hostile world where armed
explorers had died? She had tried to be brave before the Gerns but nowтАФnow night was at hand and
out of it would come terror and death for herself and Billy. They would never see Dale again, never see
Athena or Earth or even the dawn on the world that had killed them . . .
She tried not to cry, and failed. Billy's cold little hand touched her own, trying to reassure her.
"Don't cry, Mama. I guessтАФI guess everybody else is scared, too."
Everyone else . . .
She was not alone. How could she have thought she was alone? All around her were others, as
helpless and uncertain as she. Her story was only one out of four thousand.
"I guess they are, Billy," she said. "I never thought of that, before."
She knelt to put her arms around him, thinking: Tears and fear are futile weapons; they can never
bring us any tomorrows. We'll have to fight whatever comes to kill us no matter how scared we are. For
ourselves and for our children. Above all else, for our children . . .
"I'm going back to find our clothes," she said. "You wait here for me, in the shelter of that rock, and I
won't be gone long."
Then she told him what he would be too young to really understand.
"I'm not going to cry any more and I know, now, what I must do. I'm going to make sure that there is
a tomorrow for you, always, to the last breath of my life."
***
The bright blue star dimmed and the others faded away. Dawn touched the sky, bringing with it a
coldness that frosted the steel of the rifle in John Prentiss's hands and formed beads of ice on his gray
mustache. There was a stirring in the area behind him as the weary Rejects prepared to face the new day