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

discovery.
She followed him through the passage into the howling inferno of Titanian eclipse weather.
That day gave both of them all the experience of souls condemned to hell. They struggled hour after
hour up the ice-coated slopes of the Mountains of the Damned. The air thinned and turned so cold that
the hundred and fifty below which was the minim on Tim's thermometer dial was insufficient and the
needle rested full against the stop.
The wind kept flinging them flat against the slopes, and a dozen times the very mountains heaved
beneath them. And this was day; what, he wondered fearfully, would night be like, here among the peaks
of the Mountains of the Damned?
 Diane drove herself to the limit, and even beyond. This was their last chance; at least they must
surmount the crest before the wind shifted. Again and again she fell, but each time she rose and
clambered on. And for a time, just before evening, it seemed that they might make it.
A mile from the summit the wind died to that wierd, unnatural calm that marked, if you care to call it
so, the half-hour Titanian summer season. They bunt into a final effort; they rushed up the rugged slope
until their blood pounded in their ears. And a thousand feet short of the summit, while they dung
helplessly to a steep icy incline, they heard far off the rising whine that meant failure.
Tim paused; effort was useless now. He cast one final glance over the wild magnificance of the
Titanian landscape, then leaned close to Diane.
"Good-by, ever valiant," he murmured. "I think you loved me more than I deserved."
Then, with a bellow of triumph, the wind howled down from the peaks, sending them sliding along the
crag into darkness.
It was night when Tim recovered. He was stiff, numb, battered, but living. Diane was close beside
him; they had been caught in a cupped hollow full of ice crystals.
He bent over the girl. In that roaring wind he couldn't tell if she lived; at least her body was limp, not
yet frozen or set in the rigor of death. He did the only thing possible to him; he clutched her wrist and
started clawing his way against that impossible gale, dragging her behind him.
A quarter mile away showed the summit. He ascended a dozen feet; the wind hurled him back. He
gained fifty feet; the wind smashed him back into the hollow. Yet, somehow, dazed, all but unconscious,
he managed to drag, push, roll Diane's body along with him.
He never knew how long it took, but he made it. While the wind bellowed in colossal anger,
somehow, by some miracle of doggedness, he thrust Diane across the ridge of the summit, dragged
himself after, and gazed without comprehension on the valley beyond, where glowed the lights of Nivia,
the City of Snow.
For a while he could only cling there, then some ghost of reason returned. Diane, loyal, courageous
Diane, was here dying, perhaps dead. Doggedly, persistently, he pushed and rolled her down the slope
against a wind that sometimes lifted her into mid-air and flung her back against his face. For a long time
he remembered nothing at all, and then suddenly he was pounding on a metal door, and it was opening.
Tim couldn't sleep yet. He had to find out about Diane, so he followed the government man back
through the sunken passage to the building that served Nivia as hospital. The flame-orchids were
checked, safe; theft was impossible in Nivia, with only fifty inhabitants and no way for the thief to
escape.
The doctor was bending over Diane; he had stripped off her parka and was flexing her arms, then her
bared legs.
"Nothing broken," he said to Tim. "Just shock, exposure, exhaustion, half a dozen frostbites, and a
terrific mauling from the wind. Oh, yesтАФand a minor concussion. And a hundred bruises, more or less."
"Is that all?" breathed Tim. "Are you sure that's all?"
"Isn't that enough?" snapped the doctor.
"But she'llтАФlive?"
"She'll tell you so herself in half an hour." His tone changed to admiration. "I don't see how you did it!
This'll be a legend, I tell you. And I hear you're rich, too," he added enviously. "Well, I've a feeling you