"Donald E. Wollheim - The Secret of the ninth Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wollheim Donald A)

was facing the Sun, the other pointed in the opposite direction.
As the two men came nearer and nearer, the strangeness in the air increased.
They felt they were being penetrated through and through with invisible lances,
with tiny prickles of heat. "Radiation?" queried Burl softly, afraid of the
answer. His father trudged grimly on for a moment, and then put down his pack.
He took out a Geiger counter and activated it.
He shook his head. "No radioactivity," he said. "Whatever this is, it isn't
that."
They reached the wall of the building. Oddly, here they seemed sheltered from
the unusual vibrations. Burl realized that the source was above them, probably
the two mighty discs raised high in the sky.
The Dennings surveyed the building, but found no entrance. It must have been a
quarter of a mile around its walls, but there was no sign of a door or entry.
The wall was of a rocklike substance, but it was not like any rock or plastic
Burl had ever seen.
"We've got to get in," said Burl as they returned to the starting point, "but
how?"
His father smiled. "This way." He opened his pack and took two cans of blasting
powder from it. "I thought these would come in handy. Lucky we had some left
over from the blasting we did last week."
He set both cans at the base of the high wall, wired them together, and ran the
wire as far as it reached. When the two men were a safe distance away, Mark
sparked off the explosive.
There was a thunderous roar-- rocks and dirt showered around them, and bits of
black powdery stuff. When the smoke cleared, Burl and his father leaped to their
feet, rifles in hand.
There was a crack in the side of the wall where the explosive had gone off. And
the rip was large enough to get through!
Without a word, they charged across the ground, still smoking from the
concussion, and squeezed through the mysterious walls of the enigmatic building.

The walls were thin, thin but hard, as befit masters of atomic engineering.
Inside, they found a roomless building-- one single chamber within the frame of
the outer walls.
A dim, bluish light emanated from the curving ceiling. On the uncleared rocky
ground which was the floor of the building were a number of huge machines.
They were spherical glassy inventions, many times the height of a man, connected
by strings of thick metal bars and rows of smaller globes, none of which was
familiar. There was a steady humming noise, and above, the two giant, metal
masts penetrating the ceiling rotated slowly. Doubtless, the great Sun-trapping
discs were affixed to the top of these masts.
There was no living thing in sight.
Burl and his father stood silently, half crouched, with rifles at the ready, but
nothing moved to challenge them. There was only the humming of the Sun
transmitters.
Burl called out, but there was no answer. They advanced cautiously, fearing a
trap. The place did not have the look of living things about it. "An automatic
station," said Mark under his breath. "I think it's strictly automatic."
It gradually became evident that Mark was right. Everything was automatic.
Whoever had built this structure to divert the rays of the Sun had simply set it