"Stanley G. Weinbaum - Flight on Titan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weinbaum Stanley G)

blasting night when the temperature on his thermometer showed a hundred and forty below. Stark fear
gripped him. If Diane's shelter had fallen! He fought his way madly against the wind to the spot and
shouted in relief. The dome had grown, but still stood; he kicked his way in to find Diane trembling and
pallid; she had feared him lost or dead. It was almost dawn before the shelter collapsed.
Strangely, that day was easier. It was bitterly cold, but they had reached the foothills of the
Mountains of the Damned, and ice-covered crags offered shelter from the winds. Diane's strength held
better; they made the best progress they had yet achieved.
 But that meant little now, for there before them, white and glittering and cold, loomed the range of
mountains, and Tim despaired when he looked at them. Just beyond, perhaps twenty-five miles away, lay
Nivia and safety, but how were they ever to cross those needle peaks?
Diane was still on her feet at nightfall. Tim left her standing in the shelter of a bank of ice and set out
to find an ant bubble. But this time he failed. He found only a few tiny six-inch domes; there was nothing
that offered refuge from a night that promised to be fiercer than any he had seen. He returned at last in
despair.
"We'll have to move farther," he told her.
Her grave, weary eyes frightened him.
"No matter," she said quietly. "We'll never cross the Mountains of the Damned, Tim. But I love you."
They moved on. The night dropped quickly to a hundred and forty below, and their limbs turned
numb and slow to respond. Ice ghosts whirred past them; cliffs quaked and rumbled. In half an hour they
were both nearing exhaustion, and no crystal shelter appeared.
In the lee of a ridge Diane paused, swaying against him, "No use, Tim," she murmured. "I'd rather die
here than fight longer. I can't." She let herself sink to the ice, and that action saved their lives.
Tim bent over her, and as he did a black shadow and glistening beak cleaved the air where his head
had been. A knife-kite! Its screech of anger drifted faintly back as it whirled away on that hundred-mile
wind.
"You see," said the girl, "it's hopeless."
Tim gazed dully around, and it was then that he saw the funnel. Young had mentioned these curious
caves in the ice, and sometimes in the rocks, of the Mountains of the Damned. Opening always north or
south, he had thought them the homes of the natives, so placed and shaped to prevent their filling with ice
needles. But the traders had learned that the natives have no homes.
"We're going in there!" Tim cried.
He helped Diane to her feet and they crept into the opening. The funnellike passage narrowed, then
widened suddenly into a chamber, where steam condensed instantly on their goggles. That meant
warmth; they opened their visors, and Tim pulled out his electric torch.
"Look!" gasped Diane. In the curious chamber, walled half by ice and half by rock of the mountain,
lay what was unmistakably a fallen, carved column.
"Good Heaven!" Tim was startled momentarily from his worries. "This iceberg harbored a native
culture once! I'd never have given those primitive devils credit for it."
"Perhaps the natives weren't responsible," said the girl. "Perhaps there was once some higher
creature on Titan, hundreds of thousands of years ago, when Saturn was hot enough to warm it. Or
perhaps there still is."
Her guess was disastrously right. A voice said, "Um, uzza, uzza," and they turned to stare at the
creature emerging from a hole in the rock wall. A faceтАФno, not a face, but a proboscis like the head end
of a giant earthworm, that kept thrusting itself to a point, then contracting to a horrible, red, ringed disk.
At the point was the hollow fang or sucking tooth, and above it on a quivering stalk, the ice-green,
hypnotic eye of a Titanian threadworm, the first ever to be faced by man. They gazed in horrified
fascination as the tubular body slid into the chamber, its ropelike form diminishing at the end to the
thickness of a hair.
"Uzza, uzza, uzza," it said, and strangely, their minds translated the sounds. The thing was saying
"Sleep, sleep, sleep," over and over.