"Campbell, John W Jr - Who Goes There" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

"The Secondary Magnetic Expedition went out to investigate it. There is no need for details. We found it, but it was not the huge meteorite or magnetic mountain
Norris had expected to find. Iron ore is magnetic, of course; iron more so -and certain special steels even more magnetic. From the surface indications, the
secondary pole we found was small, so small that the magnetic effect it had was preposterous. No magnetic material conceivable could have that effect. Soundings
throught the ice indicated it was within one hundred feet of the glacier surface.


"I think you should know the structure of the place. There is a broad plateau, a level sweep that runs more than 150 miles due south from the Secondary station,
Van Wall says. He didn't have time or fuel to fly farther, but it was running smoothly due south then. Right there, where that buried thing was, there is an
ice-drowned mountian ridge, a granite wall of unshakeable strength that has damned back the ice creeping from the south.


"And four hundred miles due south is the South Polar Plateau. You have asked me at various times why it gets warmer here when the wind rises, and most of you know.
As a meteorologist I'd have staked my word that no wind could blow at -70 degrees -that no more than a 5 mile wind could blow at -50, without causing warming due
to friction with the ground, snow and ice, and the air itself.


"We camped there on the lip of that ice-drowned mountain range for twelve days. We dug our camp into the blue ice that formed the surface, and escaped most of it.
But for twelve consecutive days the wind blew at 45 miles an hour. It went as high as 48, and fell to 41 at times. The temperature was -63 degrees. It rose to -60
and fell to -68. It was meteorologically impossible, and it went on uninterruptedly for twelve days and twelve nights.


"Somewhere to the south, the frozen air of the South Polar Plateau slides down from that 18, 000-foot bowl, down a mountain pass, over a glacier, and starts
north. There must be a funneling mountain chain that directs it, and sweeps it away for four hundred miles to hit that bald plateau where we found the secondary
pole, and 350 miles farther north reaches the Antartic Ocean.


"It's been frozen there ever since Antartica froze twenty million years ago. There has never been a thaw there.


"Twenty million years ago Antartica was beginning to freeze. We've investigated, thought and built speculations. What we believe happened was about like this.
"Something came down out of space, a ship. We saw it there in the blue ice, a thing like a submarine without a conning tower or directive vanes, 280 feet long
and 45 feet in diameter at its thickest.


"Eh, Van Wall? Space? Yes, but I'll explain that better later." McReady's steady
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voice went on.
"It came down fromspace, driven and lifted by forces men haven't discovered yet, and somehow -perhaps something went wrong then -it tangled with Earth's magnetic
field. It came south here, out of control probably, circling the magnetic pole. That's a savage country there, but when Antartica was still freezing it, it must
have been a thousand times more savage. There must have been blizzard snow, as well as drift, new snow falling as the continent glaciated. The swirl there must
have been particularly bad, the wind hurling a solid blanket of white over the lip of that now-buried mountain.


"The ship struck solid granite head-on, and cracked up. Not every one of the passengers in it was killed, but the ship must have been ruined, her driving
mechanism locked. It tangled with the Earth's field, Norris believes. No thing made by intelligent beings can tangle with the dead immensity of a planet's
natural forces and survive.