"Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - Fallen Angels" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

"There's still power," she pointed out.
 Steve shrugged and untwisted himself from his lotus position. Like
Thor, he opened the sliding van door only wide enough to squeeze
through. There was plenty of residual heat inside the van from the heater
and from their bodies, and no need to waste it.
She watched him try the door to the station. It was open. Steve hesitated
and glanced back at the van. Then he shrugged and disappeared inside. A
few minutes later he emerged juggling five more gas cans, which he filled
at the pump that Thor had unfrozen.

When everyone was back inside and the cans strapped in place, Bob
started the engine and pulled back out onto the state road. Steve held his
hands palm out over the car heater vent. "Thor was right," he said. "The
town is abandoned. The gas station was stripped. All of the tools and most
of the stock is gone." Steve bounced as he talked, rocking on the balls of his
feet. "I found a couple of packing crates that had broken open. Empty;
contents salvaged. When folks left here, they left in good order. No panic.
No looting. I'll bet there's not a U-Haul or rental truck left in town."
"Good." Will Waxman crossed his arms over his chest and settled back
against the quilted wall of the van. "That's the way it should be. A fighting
retreat, not a rout. I'll bet the station owner left the lights and pumps
running on purpose. For travelers like us."
Sherrine didn't say anything. She stared out the back window as the
night swallowed the town. It was only Labor Day and already there was a
foot of snow on the ground. By midwinter Brandon would be half-buried.
By next winter it would be gone; and the shared memories that had given it
life would be gone with it. No more bake sales. No more Harvest Queens
or church socials. In a generation, its very name would be forgotten. As
gone as if it had never been, more forgotten than Lake Woebegon . . .
"They took all their stuff with them," Steve continued. "But they didn't
bother to lock things up or turn things off."
were big enough would survive the summer and grow back into the glacier
come winter, as if the Ice were a living organism casting its seeds abroad.
At Evansville, the Edge loomed close by the Interstate and she could see
the caverns and crevasses that made up the wall of ice. A playground of the
imagination. There were castles with battlements of crenels and merlons;
cathedrals of buttresses and spires. Wormholes bored by fantastic
creatures. Faerie pillars of gleaming crystal standing isolated like sentinels
on the prairie, yards in front of the tidal wave of ice. In other places, the
Edge was a gradual sloping ramp leading up to the frozen plateau above.
Steve and Will were entranced by the sight; and even Sherrine and the
other hardened Northerners gazed in awe. It was one thing to live near the
Ice, to see it in pictures and photographs. It was another thing to look upon
it in all its cold and terrible beauty.
"I never thought it would be like this," said Steve. "I expected-тАФI donтАЩt
know. A solid wall. A slab of ice a mile thick sliding south. The boulder
fields I can understand; but why does it slope upwards like a ramp in
places?"
"The Edge is only two, three hundred feet high," Mike told him. "But it
gets thicker toward the northeast. It's easily a mile thick over Ontario. Ice