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

was struggling bravely, but she was unequal to the effort. She was weakening; the pitiless wind kept
lashing her to her knees, and each time she rose more slowly, leaned more heavily on Tim's supporting
arm. All too quickly came the moment he had foreseen with despairing heart, when she did not rise at all.
He crouched beside her; tears misted his goggles as he distinguished her words above the screaming
of the blast.
 "You go on, Tim," she murmured. She gestured toward the bag on her throat. "Take the
flame-orchids and leave me."
Tim made no answer, but cradled her tired body in his arms, shielding her as best he could from the
furious winds. He thought desperately. To remain here was quick death; at least he might carry Diane to
some more sheltered spot, where they could sink more slowly into the fatal sleep of cold. To leave her
was unthinkable; she knew that, too, but it had been a brave offer to make.
She clung weakly to him as he lifted her; he staggered a dozen steps before the wind toppled him,
and the last struggle brought him to the lee of a low hillock. He dropped behind it and gathered the girl
into his arms to wait for the cold to do its work.
He stared hopelessly ahead. The wild splendor of a Titanian night was before him, with the icy stars
glittering on cold and glassy peaks. Just beyond their hillock stretched the smooth surface of a
wind-swept glacier, and here and there were the crystalline bubbles of the ice-ants.
The ice-ants! Lucky little creatures! He remembered Young's description of them in the book at the
shack. Within those domes it was warm; the temperature was above forty. He stared at them, fragile and
yet resisting that colossal wind. He knew why; it was their ovoid shape, the same principle that enables
an egg to resist the greatest pressure on its two ends. No one can break an egg by squeezing it endways.
Suddenly he started. A hope! He murmured a word to Diane, lifted her, and staggered out on the
mirror-surface of the ice. There! There was a dome large enoughтАФfully six feet across. He circled to the
lee side and kicked a hole in the glittering roundness.
Diane crawled weakly through. He followed, crouching beside her in the dusk. Would it work? He
gave a long cry of relief as he perceived the scurrying three-inch figures of the ice-ants, saw them
patching the dome with crystal fragments.
Steam misted his nonfrosting goggles. He drew Diane against him and then opened his visor. Warm
air! It was like balm after the bitter air without; it was musty, perhapsтАФbut warm! He opened Diane's;
she was sleeping in exhaustion and never stirred as he uncovered her pale, drawn features.
His eyes grew accustomed to the gloomy starlight that filtered through the dome. He could see the
ice-ants, little three-legged ruddy balls that run about with a galloping motion. They weren't ants at all, of
course, nor even insects in the terrestrial sense; Young had named them ants because they lived in antlike
colonies.
Tim saw the two holes that pierced the saucerlike floor; through one, he knew, warm air came up
from the mysterious hive below, and the other drained away the melting water of the dome. That dome
would grow until it burst, but the ants didn't care; they'd sense the bursting point and have a new dome
already started above the holes.
For a time he watched them; they paid no attention at all to the intruders, whose rubber suits offered
nothing edible. They were semicivilized little creatures; he observed them curiously as they scraped a gray
mold from the ice, loaded it on tiny sledges that he recognized as leaves of the whiplash tree, and tugged
the load to one of the holes, dumping it in, presumably, to a handling crew below. And after a while he
fell asleep, and precious time trickled away.

Hours later something awakened him to daylight. He sat up; he had been lying with his head pillowed
on his arm to keep his face from the water, and he rubbed the half-paralyzed limb ruefully as he stared
about. Diane was still sleeping, but her face was more peaceful, more rested. He smiled gently down on
her, and suddenly a flicker of motion caught his eye and, at the same time, a flash of brilliance.
The first was only an ice-ant scurrying across the rubber of her parka. The flash wasтАФhe started
violentlyтАФit was a flame-orchid rolling sluggishly in the stream of water to the vent, and there went