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

-now reported success.
Some object had come into being from nothingness, out of nowhere. It had definitely not arrived.
It had become. It was twenty thousand feet high, eighty miles 167° from the base, and its
appearance had been accompanied by such a burst of radio noise as neither storm nor atomic
explosion had ever made before.
And the thing which came from nowhere and therefore was quite impossible, now moved toward the
east at roughly three times the speed of sound.
Voices came abruptly out of the inter-base radio speaker. The French and Danish and English asked
each other if they'd heard that hellish racket, and what could it be? A Russian voice snapped
suspiciously that the Americans should be queried.
And the wave-guide radar simply followed a large object which had not come from outer space like a
meteor, nor over the horizon like a plane or a guided missile, but which quite clearly, if
theatrically, had come out of no place at all.
The sheer impossibility of the thing was only part of the problem it presented. The radar stayed
with it. Moving eastward, far away in the frigid night, it seemed suddenly to put on brakes.
According to the radar, its original speed was close to Mach 3-thirty-nine miles a minute.
Then it checked swiftly. It came to a complete stop. Suddenly it hurtled backward along the line
it had followed. It wobbled momentarily as if it had done a flip-flop four miles above the ground.
It dove. It stopped dead in mid-air for a full second and abruptly began to rise in an insane,
corkscrew course which ended in a fantastic plunge headlong toward the ground.
It dropped like a stone. It fell for long, long seconds. Once it wavered, as if making a final
effort to continue its frenzy in the air. But again it fell downward. It reached the horizon. It
dropped behind it.
Seconds later the ground trembled very, slightly. Soames hit the graph-machine case. The pens
jiggled. He'd made a time-recording of an earth-shock somewhere.
Now he read off ~he interval between the burst of screaming static and the jog he'd made by
striking the instrument. Earth-shock surface waves travel at four miles per second. The radar had
said the thing which appeared in mid-air did so eighty miles away. The static-burst was
simultaneous. There was a twenty-second interval between the static and the arrival of the earth-
tremor waves. The static and the appearance of something from nowhere and the point of origin of
the earth-shock matched up. They. were one event. The event was timed with the outburst of radio
noise, not the impact of the falling object, which was a minute later.
Soames struggled to imagine what that event could be. The inter-base radio babbled. Somebody
discovered that the static had been on all wave-lengths at the same time. It had been enormously
powerfuL No lightning-bolt could have filled all frequency-bands with static of such volume and
duration. There would be many hundreds of thousands of kilowatts needed merely to cover the
Antarctic on all broadcast bands. Voices argued about it.
Gail munnured to Captain Moggs. They heard the man on stand-by watch say tiredly that the
Americans had heard the static but didn't know what it was. The Russian voice announced that
Americans tested secret weapons in the ice-wastes of the interior. This was another test. Of what?
In the radar-dome Captain Moggs said indignantly, "This is monstrous! I shall report this to
Washington! They accuse us of testing secret weapons when we've assured them we aren't! Mr.
Soames, what, was actually the object the radar picked up, and what caused that static they talk
about? I shall need to explain it when I report."
Soames looked away from Gail.
"The static," he said, "if you call it that, was caused
by the appearance ,of the thing the radar picked up and followed."
"And what was that thing?" demanded Captain Moggs.
Soames paused.