"Murray Leinster - Four from Planet 05" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

wavered and spun and turned and flickered. Gail watched it.
Outside the sky was black with a myriad of stars. The ground was white. But it was not really
ground at all. It was ice that covered everything. It extended twenty miles north to the Barrier,
with icy blue sea beyond that, and southward to the Pole itself, past towering mountains and
howling emptiness and cold beyond imagining.
This was the Gissel Bay base of U.S.-in-Antarctica. The main building was almost buried in snow.
One
light bulb burned outside it, to guide back those who had business out-of-doors. Other signs of
brightness showed in almost-snowed-up windows. Off to one side stood the plastic-domed meteor-
watch structure in which Soames displayed the special complicated wave-guide radar with which he
did his work here. He showed it to Gail because, as a girl reporter flown down to do human-
interest aiticles on Antarctic research, she might get a story out of it.
No motion showed anywhere. The only sound was wind. A faint shooting star streaked across the sky
and downward to extinction. Nothing else happened. This seemed the most unlikely of all possible


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places for the future of the world to begin to change.
Inside the base's main building one man stayed awake on stand-by watch. A short-wave radio
transmitter-receiver was at his elbow, tuned to the frequency of all the bases of all the nations
now on Antarctica- English, French, Belgian, Danish, Russian. The stand-by man yawned. There was
nothing to do. Nights were five hours long at this season of the year, and it was still worth
while to keep to a regular sleep-and-work schedule.
In the radar dome, under the plastic hemisphere, Soames and Gail watched a clock ticking
sepulchrally. From time to time a tinny voice came out of a repeater-speaker hooked in to the
short-wave receiver in the main building. It was designed to make all inter-base communications
available here. The voices were sometimes English, but more often French or Danish or Russian. Now
and again somebody spoke at length, and nobody answered. The effect was of disconnected mumbling.
~There's not much of a story in my work," said Soames politely. "I work with this wave-guide
radar. It's set to explore the sky instead of the horizon. It spots meteors coming in from space,
records their height and course and speed, and follows them down until they burn up in the air.
From its record we can figure out the orbits they followed before Earth's gravity pulled them
down."
Gail nodded, looking at Soames instead of the complex instrument. She wore the multi-layer cold-
weather gar
ments issued for Antarctica, but somehow she did not look grotesque in them. Now her expression
was faintly vexed.
The third person in the dome was Captain Estelle Moggs, W. A. C., in charge of Gail's journey and
the general public relations angle.
"I just chart the courses of meteors," repeated Soames. "That's all."
Captain Moggs spoke authoritatively, "Met~ws, of course, are shooting stars."
"You saw the wave-guide tube stand still jug now," observed Soames. "It pointed steadily in one
direction. it had picked up a speck of rock some seventy miles high. It followed that rock down
until it burned out thirty-five miles up and forty miles to the west of us. You saw the record on
the two screens. This machine made a graph of the height, angle and speed on this tape, rolling
through under the pens. And that's all there is to it."
Gail shook her head, watching him.
"Can't you give me a human angler' she asked. 'Tm a woman. I'd like to be interested."