"Williamson-DarkStarOne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

He dared not think of all he longed for.

Jake Hinch came to take command. A hawk-faced angry man with a ragged beard and
a black beret, he was a friend of Stecker but still a stranger on the ship.
Cruzet and Andersen looked hard at each other when they heard the clink of
bottles in his bag, but he merely muttered an order for them to carry on as
planned and took refuge in his curtained cubicle at the rear of the machine,
making no trouble.

The scout was new to all three of them, but easy enough to drive. A great,
ungainly metal insect, it carried its bright steel shell high on six long
lever-legs that rolled on big-tired wheels for feet. A heat lamp on a tall mast
shone to shield them from the cold. They made practice runs along the old beach,
and Andersen let Mondragon take the wheel when they set out across the frozen
ocean.

"Steer by the sun," Andersen told him. "Just to the right of it."

The cold dwarf sun, the black spot on the stars. Never rising, never setting, it
drifted very slowly higher and very slowly back again with the motion Cruzet
called libration. Live stars blazed close around it, never dimming or even
twinkling; no air or clouds had veiled them for geologic ages. The level
whiteness showed no break ahead, no mark behind except the faint dark scar their
tires made.

He caught a faint ozone bite from the cycler, which Andersen was still
adjusting. Listening, he heard the whisper of the turbine, the muffled murmur
when the others spoke, the rustle of his clothing when he moved. Nothing else,
because this dead world had no air to carry sound.

He drove without the head lamps. Lighting the ice for only a few hundred meters,
they had blinded him to everything beyond. Without them, his eyes adjusted to
the starlight. A dim gray world with all color lost, except in the dull red glow
of the heat lamp.

He had seen the troubling flash through the wide-field telescope as they orbited
to land. A bright sudden light, burning through every color of the spectrum from
deepest red to darkest violet, but gone before anybody could be sure of
anything. It had come from a spot somewhere out across the frozen ocean, almost
due east of the headland.

Five hundred kilometers out, Andersen said. Closer to a thousand, Cruzet
thought. The ice around it had looked bright on the radar image, as if rough
enough to make a strong reflection. Perhaps an island? A mountain? Cruzet, who
had seen it at a higher resolution, said it had looked too tall and thin to be
any natural mountain.

A fortress of the ice gods?