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

"We had decanite bombs and thermite. Thermite is the ice-softener; decanite might have shattered valuable things, where the thermite's heat would just loosen the
ice. Dr. Copper, Norris and I placed a 25-pound thermite bomb, wired it, and took the connector up the tunnel to the surface, where Blair had the steam tractor
waiting. A hundred yards the other side of that granite wall we set off the thermite bomb.


"The magnesium metal of the ship caught, of course. The glow of the bomb flared and died, then it began to flare again. We ran back to the tractor, and gradually
the glare built up. From where we were we could see the whole ice-field illuminated from beneath with an unbearable light; the ship's shadow was a great,
dark cone reaching off towards the north, where the twilight was just about gone. For a moment it lasted, and we counted three other shadow things that might have
been other -passengers -frozen there. Then the ice was crashing down and against the ship.


"That's why I told you about that place. The wind sweeping down from the Pole was at our backs. Steam and hydrogen flame were torn away in white ice-fog; the
flaming heat under the ice there was yanked away toward the Antartic Ocean before it touched us. Otherwise we wouldn't have come back, even with the shelter of that
granite ridge that stopped the light.


"Somehow in the blinding inferno we could see great hunched things, black bulks glowing, even so. They shed even the furious incandescence of the magnesium for a
time. Those must have been the engines, we knew. Secrets going in a blazing glory -secrets that might have given Man the planets. Mysterious things that could lift
and hurl that ship -and had soaked in the force of the Earth's magnetic field. I saw Norris' mouth move, and ducked. I couldn't hear him.


"Insulation -something -gave way. All Earth's field they'd soaked up twenty million years before broke loose. The aurora in the sky licked down, and the whole
plateau there was bathed in cold fire that blanketed vision. The ice-axe in my hand got red hot, and hissed on the ice. Metal buttons on my clothes burned into
me. And a flash of electric blue seared upward from beyond the granite wall.


"Then the walls of ice crashed down on it. For an instant it squealed the way dry-ice does when it's pressed between metal.


"We were blind and groping in the dark for hours while our eyes recovered. We found every coil within a mile was fused rubbish, the dynamo and every radio set,
the earphones and speakers. If we hadn't had the steam tractor, we wouldn't have gotten over to the Secondary Camp.


"Van Wall flew in from Big Magnet at sun-up, as you know. We came home as soon as possible. That is the history of -that." McReady's great bronze beard gestured
toward the thing on the table.
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Chapter 2
Blair stirred uneasily, his little, bony fingers wriggling under the harsh light. Little brown freckles on his knuckles slid back and forth as the tendons under the
skin twitched. He pulled aside a bit of tarpaulin and looked impatiently at the dark ice-bound thing inside.


McReady's big body straightened somewhat. He'd ridden the rocking, jarring steam tractory forty miles that day, pushing on to Big Magnet here. Even his calm will
had been pressed by the anxiety to mix again with humans. It was alone and quiet out there in Secondary Camp, where a wolf-wind howled down from the Pole. Wolf-wind
howling in his sleep -winds droning and the clear, blue ice, with a bronze ice-ax buried in its skull.


The giant meteorologist spoke again. "The problem is this. Blair wants to examine the thing. Thaw it out and make micro slides of its tissues and so forth. Norris
doesn't believe that is safe, and Blair does. Dr. Copper agrees pretty much with Blair. Norris is a physicist, of course, not a biologist. But he makes a point I