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

"It's all right."

"There's nothing there but ice."

"Mama, it's colder in space than it will be on the surface. There's some
solar heating."

"Why must we go down?"

"Because we want to be rich," he said. "Because I need better readings
of those metal sources. I can get them by driving a heat probe through the
ice."

Fran was still doubtful. She watched nervously as Old Folks lowered
into a hint of atmosphere and then landed on the gleaming, icy surface.
 It was not necessary for Dan to leave the ship. Old Folks was equipped
with some basic exploratory tools, one of which was a probe that punched
its way easily through two hundred feet of ice in less than an hour.

"Wow," Dan said, as the instruments recorded the nearness of masses
of metal, ore so pure that he couldn't believe it. There was so much of it
and so many metals were mixed together that all he got on the locater was
a big mass of light.

He directed the probe to bend and melt its way toward the nearest
metallic mass.

"I really don't understand this," he said.

The probe was within feet of something that showed on the
instruments as a great heap of metals.

"Dan, I'm cold," Fran said, clasping her arms.

"Your imagination, Mama," Dan said. "The ice is outside."

Fran shivered. The probe neared the source of the fantastically high
metallic readings. Dan, himself, felt a chill, looked up to see that Fran was
shivering.

"Papa, let's go."

"Yes."

He reached. His hand froze. He felt a deadness creeping up his arm. He
cried out. His breath made a cloud of vapor that froze instantly. Fran
toppled, crashing stiffly to the deck. Dan reached for the panic button. His
finger made contact, but he was so numb that he wasn't sure he actually
pushed the button that would send a call for help beaming outward from