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

Those gods of ice had been only a joke from Andersen, who liked to recall his
Viking forebears, but nobody had thought of anything more possible. The flash
had come just after the radar search beam swept the spot. Could Jake Hinch be
right? Had it been an actual warning, from anything alive?

Would it come again? * * *

Leaning over the wheel, Mondragon scanned the fiat infinity of bone-white frost.
A film of frozen argon and nitrogen, Cruzet said, the last trace of the vanished
atmosphere. He scanned the splendid sky above it, steady stars burning brighter
than those he had known in his boyhood in Chihuahua, set in constellations he
had never seen. Ice and stars and dead black sun, nothing else.

No sudden flame with all the colors of el arco iris. No signal from the ice
gods, if gods or devils either might exist in this ice infierno where no life of
any kind should be. Cruzet came at last to take the wheel, and he climbed into
the quartz-domed observation bubble and kept on watching till he dozed and shook
himself awake to watch again. Ice and stars and dead sun-disk, nada mas.

Andersen came to drive. At the kitchen shelf in the cabin, Cruzet stirred dry
powder into hot water to make the bitter stuff they called syncafe and opened a
pack of omninute wafers. Mondragon sliced a cold slab of soyamax, wishing for
the goat enchiladas his mother used to make. They called Hinch to ask if he was
hungry.

"Garbage!" he shouted through the curtain, voice slurred with whatever he had
brought in his bottles. "I've got my own."

Andersen stopped the scout, and they ate soyamax and omninute.

"Compact calories," Andersen said. "Planned to keep the colony alive till we can
do better. Every nutrient we need." He made a face. "It will make us try for
anything better."

Mondragon slept an hour and took the wheel again. Frost and stars and the dead
black sun. Still half asleep, he yawned and worked his stiff hands, stretched
and stood behind the wheel, slapped his face and sat again, gripped the wheel
and blinked at the level dark horizon.

Something there?

No spectral flash. Only a small black dot on the frost, but maybe something far
away. He rubbed his eyes and veered a little toward it. The mountain Cruzet said
looked too thin and high to be a mountain? His breath came faster. Should he
radio the ship?

"Keep in constant touch," Glengarth had told them. "I don't know what's out
there to concern us. Most likely nothing, but we've got to play it safe. If you
come on anything unusual, anything at all, call at once. If you approach, do it
with all the care you can."