"Aleksandr Abramov, Sergei Abramov. Horsemen from Nowhere ("ВСАДНИКИ НИОТКУДА", англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

Aleksandr Abramov, Sergei Abramov.


Horsemen from Nowhere


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Translated from the Russian by George Yankovsky
Александр Абрамов, Сергей Абрамов "ВСАДНИКИ НИОТКУДА" б horsmen1.txt
MIR PUBLISHERS
Moscow 1969
OCR: http://home.freeuk.com/russica2 б http://home.freeuk.com/russica2
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"Horsemen From Nowhere" is a science-fiction story about the arrival on
earth of mysterious rose-coloured "clouds" from deep space. Members of the
Soviet Antarctic expedition are the first to meet them in a series of
inexplicable events. The "clouds" are seen to be removing the Antarctic
ice-cap and carrying it off into space. They are capable of reproducing any
kind of atomic structure, and this goes for human beings as well. The heroes
of the story meet their "counterparts", come upon a duplicated airliner,
journey through a modelled city, and fight Gestapo policemen that have been
reconstructed from the past by these same mysterious "clouds". Scientists
are not able to explain why terrestrial life is being modelled. All attempts
to contact the space beings fail. In the end, however, Soviet scientists
penetrate the enigma of the rose clouds and establish contact with a highly
developed extragalactic civilization.


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* PART ONE. THE ROSE CLOUD



Chapter I. A CATASTROPHE




The snow was fluffy and soft, not at all the compacted, sand-paper-like
crystalline neve of the polar wastes. The Antarctic summer was mild, and the
gay frost that tweaked the ears ever so slightly created an atmosphere of
Sunday hiking back home in Moscow. Our thirty-five-ton snow tractor was
gliding along at a marvellous clip, but in winter even the airplane skis
could hardly tear away from the supercooled ice crystals. Vano was a skilled
driver and didn't bother to put the brakes on even in the case of suspicious
humps and bumps of ice.