"Zach Hughes - Deep Freeze" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

Old Folks. He managed to fall beside the woman he had loved since he was
sixteen, taking her into his arms with the last of his strength as the
terrible cold penetrated into his stomach. He could not feel her. He
wanted to weep.

The water in the tanks froze and burst the containment bulkheads.
Rime formed on the outer hull. Motion in the computer's Verbolt Cloud
chambers began to slow. Metals were weakened as temperatures dropped
toward and past the cold of empty space. The hull crumbled and the air
gushed out to freeze into drifting clouds that soon sank to the permanent
snow cover and became a part of it. Over a period of months Old Folks
collected crystals of ice from the thin atmosphere and whitened to become
nothing more than a lump on the smoothness of the plain of ice. On a line
toward the periphery the temporary beacons left behind by Dan Webster
to guide him back to Rimfire's routes began to lose power and fail one by
one. No trace of Old Folks remained. The only hint as to her final resting
place was a nodule of ice protruding from the smoothness of the snows.


CHAPTER TWO

David Webster tried to get back to Tigian II once every three years. He
had missed that goal by ten months when he blinked a sleek, new,
Zede-built executive liner into a holding position over the T-Town
Interplanetary Spaceport and contacted T-Town Control to report arrival
and ask for landing instructions. He had named the multimillion credit
ship the Fran Webster, for his mother, and he was looking forward to
showing it to her.

Since the Fran Webster shouted money to anyone who knew ships, she
attracted her share of attention. The young man who met David on the
pad at the foot of the boarding ladder was full of questions, questions that
David answered patiently as he was driven toward the terminal, for he
could remember when he had worked at the T-Town port and when his
goal had been to board a ship, any ship that was going to blink anywhere
away from Tigian II.

"Yep," David said, "The Zedes build a good ship." He had sold his last
cargo to a jewel broker in the Zede League and, to his own surprise, he
had come away with the Zede-built Starliner. He had had no intention of
buying a new ship. His Little David, a civilian conversion of an X&A scout,
had been only five years old and he was very fond of it. The difference
between fondness and love became apparent when he took one look at the
Zede Starliner.

He didn't often do business with the Zede worlds. In spite of their
having been absorbed into the United Planets Confederation well over a
thousand years past, the worlds and the people of the Zede systems were
vaguely, inexplicably alien. It was difficult to get anyone to talk about it
openly, but, even after a thousand years, there was still deep-seated