"Geoffrey A. Landis - The Man in the Mirror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

He was lucky he didnтАЩt sled right into the artifact. HeтАЩd been having
such a good time hot-dogging the snowcat, heтАЩd stopped paying attention
and had lost track of how far heтАЩd come. Fortunately his navigation
computer hadnтАЩt, and warned him when he was approaching the artifact.

Once cued to look, he could see it: in the distance, the horizon cut off
abruptly. Lee flicked the image intensifier back on, and suddenly it was
impossible to miss, a sharp black line across the red horizon. He slowed
down to approach it cautiously, edging up to the razor-sharp edge between
the snow and the black, and finally getting off the snowcat and creeping
forward slowly.

He looked down.

The black was speckled with stars.

For an instant he thought it was a hole straight through the planet, and
then he wondered if it could be a portal to another universe.

Lee anchored the snowcat and clipped a safety tether to it. His
toolpack carried all his gear, but carrying the pack made it too awkward for
him to bend over, so he took it off and wore only the skin-tight nudie suit.
Making sure that his tether was secure, he kneeled down at the edge and
leaned over to look down.

He saw a golden helmet faceplateтАФhis own faceplateтАФlooking up at
him.

The black surface was not black at all, but a gargantuan mirror
reflecting the blackness of space, angled steeply away from him. Close up,
he could see the sharp image of stars reflected in it. He was so close to it
that it seemed perfectly flat, but looking across in the distance he could see
the subtle curve.

He put his hand on it (the mirror-image hand coming up from below to
touch his), and it was perfectly smooth and perfectly slick. Absolutely
smooth, slicker than oil, as if he was touching nothing, no resistance at all to
him sliding his palm across the surface.

Through his glove he couldnтАЩt sense the temperature. His suit was a
near-perfect insulator; it had to be, of course, to operate in the outer solar
system, where the miners walked the cryogenic ice fields of
trans-Neptunian and Kuiper objects.

Lee checked the external temperature meter on the fingertip of one
glove. Pressing his finger to the mirrorтАЩs surface, the gauge read five
Kelvin. The reading was so unlikely that he pulled his hand away to try
another spot. The next spot was still five Kelvin, as was a third spot, and a
fourth.