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

"One of its passengers stepped out. The wind we saw there never fell below 41, and the temperature never rose above -60. Then, the wind must have been stronger. And
there was drift falling in a solid sheet. The 'thing' was lost completely in ten paces." He paused for a moment, the deep, steady voice giving way to the the drone
of wind overhead, and the uneasy, malicious gurgling in the pipe of the galley stove.


Drift -a drift-wind was sweeping by overhead. Right now the snow picked up by the mumbling wind fled in level, blinding lines across the face of the buried camp. If
a man stepped out of the tunnels that connected each of the camp buildings beneath the surface, he'd be lost in ten paces. Out there, the slim, black finger of the
radio mast lifted 300 feet into the air, and at its peak was the clear night sky. A sky of thin, whining wind rushing steadily from beyond to another beyond under
the licking, curling mantle of the aurora. And off north, the horizon flamed with queer, angry colors of the midnight twilight. That was spring 300 feet above
Antartica.


At the surface -it was white death. Death of a needle-fingered cold driven before the wind, sucking heat from any warm thing. Cold -and white mist of endless,
everlasting drift, the fine, fine particles of licking snow that obscured all things.


Kinner, the little, scar-faced cook, winced. Five days ago he had stepped out to the surface to reach a cache of frozen beef. He had reached it, started back -and
the drift-wind leapt out of the south. Cold, white death that streamed across the ground blinded him in twenty seconds. He stumbled on wildly in circles. It was
half an hour before rope-guided men from below found him in the impenetrable murk.


It was easy for man -or 'thing'-to get lost in ten paces.
"And the drift-wind then was probably more impenetrable than we know." McReady's voice snapped Kinner's mind back. Back to welcome, dank warmth of the Ad Building.
"The passenger of the ship wasn't prepared either, it appears. It froze within ten feet of the ship.


"We dug down to find the ship, and our tunnel happened to find the frozen -animal. Barclay's axe ice-axe struck its skull.
"When we saw what it was, Barclay went back to the tractor, started the fire up and when the steam pressure built, sent a call for Blair and Dr. Copper. Barclay
himself was sick then. Stayed sick for three days, as a matter of fact.


"When Blair and Copper came, we cut out the animal in a block of ice, as you see, wrapped it and loaded it on the tractor for return here. We wanted to get into
that ship.


"We reached the side and found the metal was something we didn't know. Our
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beryllium-bronze, non-magnetic tools wouldn't touch it. Barclay had some tool-steel on the tractor, and that wouldn't scratch it either. We made reasonable
tests -even tried some acid from the batteries with no results.


"They must have had a passivating process to make magnesium metal resist acid that way, and the alloy must have been at least 95 per cent magnesium. But we had no
way of guessing that, so when we spotted the barely opened lock door, we cut around it. There was clear, hard ice inside the lock, where we couldn't reach it.
Through the little crack we could look in and see that only metal and tools were in there, so we decided to loosen the ice with a bomb.