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

another! The ants had cut and carried away for food the little leather bag, exposed on Diane's breast by
the opening of her visor.
He snatched the rolling gem of flame from the trickling water and searched desperately for the others.
No use. Of their eighteen precious ovoids, he had retrieved exactly oneтАФthe small but perfect one for
which they had traded the clock. He gazed in utter despondency at the flaming little egg for which they
had riskedтАФand probably lostтАФeverything.
 Diane stirred, sat up. She saw at once the consternation in his face. "Tim!" she cried. "What's wrong
now?"
He told her. "It's my fault," he concluded grimly. "I opened your suit. I should have foreseen this." He
slipped the lone gem into his left gauntlet, where it nestled against his palm.
"It's nothing, Tim," said Diane softly. "What use would all eighteen be to us, or a hundred? We might
as well die with one as with all of them."
He did not answer directly. He said: "Even one will be enough if we get back. Perhaps eighteen
would have glutted the market; perhaps we'll get almost as much for one as we would have for all."
That was a lie, of course; other traders would be increasing the supply, but it served to distract her
mind.
Tim noticed then that the ice-ants were busy around the two vents at the center; they were building
an inner dome. The crystal egg above them, now eight feet through, was about to crack.
He saw it coming, and they closed their visors. There was a jagged streak of light on the west, and
suddenly, with a glistening of fragments, the walls collapsed and went spinning away over the icy floor,
and the wind howled down upon them, nearly flattening them to the glacier! It began to thrust them over
the ice.
They slid and crawled their way to the jagged crags beyond. Diane was strong again; her young body
recovered quickly. In a momentary shelter, he noticed something queer about the light and glanced up to
see gigantic Saturn almost half obscuring the Sun. He remembered then. This was the last day; for
seventy-two hours there would be night.
And night fell far too quickly. Sunset came with the red disk three quarters obscured, and the bitter
cold swept out of the west with a horde of ice ghosts, whose sharp needles clogged the filters of their
masks and forced them to shake them out time after time.
The temperature had never been higher than forty below all day, and the night air, coming after that
cold day, dropped rapidly to a hundred below, and even the warming filters could not prevent that frigid
air from burning in their lungs like searing flame.
Tim sought desperately for an ice-ant bubble. Those large enough were rare, and when at last he
found one, it was already too large, and the ice-ants didn't trouble to repair the hole he kicked, but set at
once to build a new dome. In half an hour the thing collapsed, and they were driven on.
Somehow, they survived the night, and dawn of the fourth day found them staggering all but helpless
into the lee of a cliff. They stared hopelessly at that strange, sunless, Saturn-lighted dawn that brought so
little warmth.
An hour after the rising of the eclipsed Sun, Tim glanced at his wrist thermometer to find the
temperature risen only to seventy below. They ate some chocolate, but each bite was a burning pain for
the moment that their visors were open, and the chocolate itself was numbing cold.
When numbness and drowsiness began to attack his limbs, Tim forced Diane to rise, and they
struggled on. Day was no better than night now, except for the cold Saturn light. The wind battered them
more fiercely than ever; it was scarcely mid-afternoon, when Diane, with a faintly audible moan,
collapsed to her knees and could not rise.
Tim stared frantically about for an ice bubble. At last, far over to the right, he saw a small one, three
feet through, perhaps, but big enough for Diane. He could not carry her; he took her shoulders and
dragged her painfully to it. She managed to creep wearily in and he warned her to sleep with her visor
closed, lest the ants attack her face. A quarter of a mile downwind he found one for himself.
It was the collapse of the bubble that wakened him. It was night again, a horrible, shrieking, howling,