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

trusting to their cleated shoes for secure footing. It was misjudgment; the wind thrust them suddenly into a
run, pressed them faster and faster until it was impossible to stop, and they were staggering through the
darkness toward unknown terrain ahead.
Tim flung himself recklessly against Diane; they fell in a heap and went sliding and rolling, to crash at
last against a low wall of ice a hundred feet beyond.
They struggled up, and Diane moaned inaudibly from the pain of a bruised knee. They crept
cautiously on; they ended a bottomless crevasse from the depths of which came strange roarings and
shriekings; they slipped miserably past a glittering cliff that shook and shifted above them. And when at
last the vast hulk of Saturn rose over the wild land before them, and the tiny reddish Sun followed like a
ruby hung on a pendant, they were near exhaustion.
Tim supported Diane to a crevice facing the Sun. For many minutes they were silent, content to rest,
and then he took a bar of chocolate from the pack and they ate, slipping the squares hastily through
visors opened for each bite.
But under the combined radiance of Saturn and the Sun, the temperature rose rapidly more than a
hundred degrees; when Tim glanced at his wrist thermometer it was already nearly thirty-eight, and pools
of water were forming in the wind-sheltered spots. He scooped some up with a rubber cup, and they
drank. Water at least was no problem.
Food might be, however, if they lived long enough to consume that in the pack. Humans couldn't eat
Titanian life because of its arsenical metabolism; they had to exist on food laboriously transported from
the Earth, or, as did the Nivian settlers, on Titanian creatures from whose substance the arsenic had first
been chemically removed. The Nivians ate the ice-ants, the whiplash trees, and occasionally, it was
sometimes whispered, the Titanian natives.
Diane had fallen asleep, lying huddled in a pool of icy water that flowed off into the open and then
was whirled into sparkling spray by the wind. He shook her gently; they couldn't afford to lose time now,
not with the shadow of the eclipse looming ominously so few hours away. But it tore his heart to see her
eyes crinkle in a weary smile as she rose; he damned himself again for ever bringing her to this.
So they plodded on, haltered and trampled by the fierce and ruthless gale. He had no idea how far
they had traveled during the night; from the crest of a high ridge he looked back, but the shifting hills of
ice made localities hard to recognize, and he could not be sure that the grim escarpment far behind was
actually the cliff that had crushed their shack.
He let Diane rest again from noon until sunset, nearly five hours. She regained much of the strength
spent in the struggle of the night, but when the dropping sun set his wrist thermometer tumbling far toward
the hundred-below-zero mark, it seemed to her as if she had not rested at all. Yet they survived another
night of inferno, and the gray of dawn found them still staggering and stumbling before the incredible
ferocity of that eternal wind.
During the morning a native appeared. They recognized him; in his clawed hands was the battered
case of the eight-day clock. He sidled up to them, head toward the wind, and held out his short arms to
display the mechanism; he whined plaintively and obviously thought himself cheated.
Tim felt an unreasoning hope at the sight of him, but it vanished immediately. The creature simply
couldn't understand their predicament; Titan was the only world he knew, and he couldn't conceive of
beings not adapted to its fierce environment. So the man stood silently as Diane wound the clock and
responded dully to her smile as she returned it.
"This time, old fellow," she said to the native, "it's ticking away our lives. If we're not in Nivia by the
time it stops againтАФ" She patted the blunt head; the creature cooed and sidled away.
They rested and slept again during the afternoon, but it was a weary pair that faced the inferno of
night. Diane was nearing exhaustion, not from lack of nourishment, but simply from the incessant battering
she had received from the wind, and the terrific struggle that every step required. Tim was stronger, but
his body ached, and the cold, striking somehow through the inch-thick parka had left him with a painfully
frostbitten shoulder.
By two hours after sunset, he perceived hopelessly that Diane was not going to survive the night. She