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

Tim was coming. She saw his gloved hand as he seized the doorframe, then his fur-masked face,
eyes grins behind the non-frosting goggles.
"Outside!" he yelled, seizing the pack.
 She ruse and scrambled after him into the howling inferno just as the second bell clanged.
Barely in time! As the tornado sent her sprawling and clutching, she had a sharply etched glimpse of a
mighty pinnacle of glittering ice looming high above the shack; there was a rumble .d a roar deeper than
the winds, and the shack was gone. One iron wall, caught by the gale, swept like a giant bat above her,
and she heard it go clanging and clattering along the slope to the east.
Dazed and horribly frightened, she clawed her way after Tim into the shelter of a ridge, watching him
while he wrestled the pack that struggled in the blast like something living. She was calm when at last he
got it strapped to his shoulders.
"This is the end, isn't it, Tim?" she said, putting her visor close against his helmet, "Because I'm glad I
came with you, then. I'm glad it's both of us together."
Tim groaned despairingly, and the blast tore the sound away. He turned suddenly, slipping his arms
around her figure. "I'm sorry, Di," he said huskily.
He wanted to kiss herтАФan impossibility, of course, in a Titanian night. It would have been a kiss of
death; they would have died with lips frozen together. He put away the thought that maybe that might he
a pleasanter way, since death was inevitable now, anyway. Better, he decided, to die fighting. He pulled
her down into the lee of the ridge and sat thinking.
They couldn't stay here; that was obvious. The rocket wasn't due for three months, and long before
then they'd be frozen corpses, rolling away before the hurricane or buried in some crevasse. They
couldn't build a habitable shelter without tools, and if they could, their atomic stove was somewhere
under the shifting cliff. They couldn't attempt the journey to Nivia, a hundred miles away across the
Mountains of the DamnedтАФor could they? That was the only possible alternative.
"Di," Tim said tensely, "we're going to Nivia. Don't be startled. Listen. The wind's just shifted. It's
behind us; we have almost eight Earth days before it changes. If we can make itтАФtwelve, thirteen miles a
dayтАФ if we can make it, we'll be safe. If we don't make it before the wind shiftsтАФ" He paused. "Well,
it's no worse than dying here."
Diane was silent. Tim frowned thoughtfully behind his goggles. It was a possibility. Pack, parka, and
all, he weighed less than Earth weight; not as much less as one would think, of course. Titan, although no
larger than Mercury, is a dense little world, and, besides, weight depends not only on a planet's density,
but also on distance from its center. But the wind might not hinder them so much, since they were
traveling with it, not against it. Its terrible thrust, fiercer than even an equal Earth wind because the air
contained thirty per cent of the heavy gas xenon, would be dangerous enough, butтАФAnyway, they had
no choice.
"Come on, Di," 'Tim said, rising. They had to keep moving now; they could rest later, after sunrise,
when the danger of a frozen sleep was less.
Another terrible thought struck TimтАФthere would be only three more sunrises. Then for four Titanian
days, the little satellite would be in the mighty shadow of Saturn, and during that long eclipse, heaven
alone knew what terrific forces might attack the harassed pair crawling painfully toward Nivia, the City of
Snow.
But that had to he faced, too. There was no alternative. Tim lifted Diane to her feet, and they crept
cautiously out of the shelter of the ridge, bowing as the cruel wind caught them and bruised them, even
through their thick suits, by flying ice fragments.
It was a dark night for Titan; Saturn was on the other side of the little world, along with the Sun it
was soon to eclipse, but the stars shone brilliant and twinkling through the shallow, but very dense and
refractive, atmosphere. The Earth, which had so often lent a green spark of cheer to the lonely couple,
was not among them; from the position of Titan, it was always near the Sun and showed only just before
sunrise or just after sunset. Its absence now seemed a desolate omen.
They came to a long, smooth, wind-swept slope. They made the error of trying to cross it erect,