"Jeff Hecht - The Crystal Highway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hecht Jeff)

and with a bit of effort he sealed it well enough to turn all the control
lights a safe green. Not daring to delay any longer for fear that Lambrecht or
common sense would find him, he closed the corridor door and opened the exit.
Axel heard the alarm scream. Somewhere inside the station, he was sure,
a control system was announcing that a madman had gone outside. He did not
know if they would send a person or a robot after him. Perhaps nothing would
come, he thought as he felt the wind push on his suit and the brittle rocks
crunch under his feet. The exit door showed no sign of having been used
before. The suit's emergency radio crackled. Lambrecht's voice told him to
come back. Axel turned the volume down low.
The winds were not strong, but their push felt strange to a man who had
spent most of his life in inside structures where winds never blew. The uneven
surface felt unreal after weeks of corridors and hallways. But the spacesuit
would not let Axel think he was walking across a grassy lawn to a park
monument. The temperature indicator read a steady 392 K, above the boiling
point of water. The air composition light flashed POISON red. At each step
across the plain surrounding the station, he put his feet carefully on
surfaces that seemed solid. He had never explored strange places before, but
he had read enough of danger to know the theory of caution.
The Crystal Highway was alive with light as he approached it, the
colors danced and changed with each step. The rational explanation, he
remembered, was the changing angle between the eye, the sun, the crystal, and
its facets. He tried to recall the poem where Vaxila had included the laws of
refraction, but the mere words and equations eluded him. The reality was far
richer, a display of iridescent sparkling life. Some slight motions changed
colors completely, yet several other steps might barely change the hue. He
could hardly take his eyes from the looming crystal for fear he would miss
something. It grew larger as he walked toward it, though Axel had no sense of
the distance he covered, or of anything but the dancing light inside the
crystal.
Partway across the plain, Axel forced himself to stop. "Observe," he
told himself, "a poet must observe and distill." He turned slowly, scanning
the plain with his eyes, then with the suit's VisionAid. Time, the winds, and
the acid air had scoured the surface down to soft, rolling hills, save for the
Crystal Highway and Lambrecht Station. Behind him, the bulk of the station
hugged the ground, dug deep against the storms that Vaxila had written could
shake its roots. Its surface was the same dull brown slippery stuff that
coated his suit. The Crystal Highway was a jagged slab, reaching up toward the
distant sun to capture its light. He walked toward it. The suit's left leg
seemed stiff, but he ignored it.
The ages and the winds had scarred the crystal. From a distance, the
wall facing the station looked smooth, but as he came closer, Axel saw the
side facing him was chipped and cracked. The stuff of the crystal wanted to be
smooth; when he came up to it, he could feel the smooth parts through his
thick glove. That made the surfaces flat and bright, but weathering cracked
the surfaces. Light sparkled off shatter patterns inside the crystal, but at
the surface, the cracks weakened it, and fragments fell off at his touch. Axel
bent down and picked some pieces from the rough ground. They glittered with
life in the light. He opened a pouch on the outside of his suit and slipped
the crystals inside.