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

Diane screamed. The thing was headed for them; it was diving now at airplane speed. It was the girl
who seized and flung a jagged piece of ice; the thing veered higher, swept like a cloud above them, and
was gone. It could not fly upwind.
They looked it up in Young's book at the shack. That intrepid explorer had seen and named the
creature; it was a knife-kite, the same sort of beast that had accounted for the death of one of his men. It
wasn't a bird; it didn't really fly; it just sailed like a kite before the terrific blasts of Titan, and touched
ground only during the weekly calm or when it had succeeded in stabbing some prey.
But life was scarce indeed on the icy little world. Except for the occasional natives, who came and
went mysteriously as spirits, and that single knife-kite, and the whiplash trees near the cliff, they saw
nothing living. Of course the crystal bubbles of the ice-ants marked the glacial surface of the hills, but
these creatures never emerged, laboring incessantly beneath their little domes that grew like mushrooms
as they melted within and received fresh deposits of ice crystals without. A lonely world, a wild, bizarre,
forbidding, and unearthly little planet.
It never actually snowed on Titan. The chill air could absorb too little water vapor for condensation
as snow, but there was a substitute. During the days, when the temperature often passed the melting
point, shallow pools formed on the frozen oceans, augmented sometimes by mighty eruptions of frigid
brine from below. The ferocious winds swept these pools into a spindrift that froze and went rushing as
clouds of icy needles around the planet.
Often during the darkness Diane had watched from the window as one of these clouds loomed
glittering in the cold-green Saturn-light, sweeping by with a scream and slithering of ice crystals on the
walls, and seeming to her mind like a tall, sheeted ghost. At suds times, despite the atom-generated
warmth of the tiny dwelling, she was apt to shiver and draw her garment closer about her, though she
was careful that Tim never observed it.
So time passed in the trading shack, slowly and dismally. The weather, of course, was uniformly,
unvaryingly terrible, such weather as only Titan, nearly nine hundred million miles from the moderating
Sun, can present. The little world, with its orbital period of fifteen days and twenty-three hours, has no
perceptible seasons; only the recurrent shifting of the winds from east to west marks its swing about
gigantic Saturn.
The season is always winterтАФfierce, bitter, unimaginable winter, to which the earthly storms of
desolate Antarctica are as April on the Riviera. And little by little, Saturn edged closer to the Sun, until
one day the western streak of its rings knifed a dark gash across the reddish disk. The eclipse was at
hand.
That night saw the catastrophe. Tim was dozing on the bunk; Diane was dreaming idly of green fields
and warm sunlight. Outside roared a gale more than usually vociferous, and a steady parade of ice ghosts
streamed past the windows. Low and ominous came the roar of shifting glacial mountains; Saturn and the
Sun, now nearly in a direct line, heaved at the planet with a redoubled tidal pull. And then suddenly came
the clang of warning; a bell rang ominously.
Diane knew what it meant. Months before, Tim had driven a row of posts into the ice, extending
toward the cliff that sheltered the whiplash grove. He had foreseen the danger; he had rigged up an alarm.
The bell meant that the cliff had shifted, had rolled upon the first of the stakes. Danger!
Tim was springing frantically from the bunk. "Dress for outside!" he snapped. "Quickly!"
He seized her lunacy sponge-rubber parka and tossed it to her. He dragged on his own, cranked the
door open to the pandemonium without, and a fierce and bitter blast swept in, upsetting a chair, spinning
loose articles around the room.
"Close the emergency pack!" he yelled above the tumult. "I'll take a look."
Diane suppressed her upsurging fear as he vanished. She strapped the pack tightly, then poured the
precious eighteen flame-orchids into a little leather pouch, and suspended this about her throat. She
forced calmness upon herself; perhaps the ice cliff had stopped, or perhaps only the wind itself had
snapped the warning post. She righted the chair and sat with her visor open despite the knife-sharp blasts
from the door.