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

"There isn't anything it could be," he said slowly. "It was impossible. There couldn't be anything
like that."
Gail cocked her head on one side.
"D'you mean it's something new to science?"
Soames was still aware of his own attraction to Gail, so he spoke with great formality. The radar
had tried to detect and range on an object that wasn't there, which was out of all reason. Yet it
was not a defect in the radar, because a thing did appear an instant later. The nearest accurate
statement would be that the radar had detected something just before it became something the radar
could detect, which did not begin 'to make sense. But there were only certain kinds of things in
the air above Antarctica, and the radar-target hadn't been any of them!
There could be planes, but planes didn't appear in mid-sky without previously having been
somewhere else. No, it wasn't a plane. There could be meteors, but it wasn't a meteor because it


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went too slowly and changed course and stood still in the air and went upward. Nor was it a
missile. A ballistic missile couldn't change course, a rocket-missile would have lert a trail of
heat-ionized gases that would show in the radar, and it would have had to come from somewhere. So
there wasn't anything for the object to be, even if it were possible for it really to be
something.
He looked at his watch.
"Six minutes and a half from the static," he said grimly. "Eighty miles. Sound travels a mile
every five seconds. Let's listen. Ten seconds . . . eight . . . six. . four..."
He stopped. Wind outside the dome blew snow crystals over each other. They made a brittle,
crystalline, tinkling sound. Now the wave-guide radar had gone back to normal operation. Its
silver-plated square tube ffickered and quivered and spun quickly in this
direction and that, searching all the sky.
There was a booming sound. It was infinitely low-pitched. It was a long, far-away, deep bass
growl, so low in frequency that it seemed more a vibration of the air than an actual sound.
It died away.
"Concussion-wave," said Soames soberly. "It arrived four-hundred-odd seconds after the static.
Eighty miles.
A noise has to be pretty loud to travel so far! A ground-shock has to be rather sharp to be felt
as an earth-tremor at eighty miles. Even a spark has to be very, very fierce to mess up radio and
radar reception at eighty miles. Something very remarkable happened down there tonight."
Gail said quickly, "You mean it may have come? A bomb? Could it be an atom bomb explosion?"
"There'd be a fireball and the radar would still be going crazy," said Soames. "We'd probably have
seen the flash through the dome, too. And nothing solid would have appeared because of an atomic
explosion. Quite the contrary! But something did turn up where the noise and static and earth-
shock started. It flew. It braked. It accellerated. It rose upward. It's something that somebody
ought to look into."
"How about a spaceship from another world?" asked Gail hopefully.
"It would have come in from outer space," said Soames. "It didn't."
"A secret weapon," said Captain Moggs firmly. "I shall report to Washington and ask orders to
investigate."
"I wouldn't," said Soames. "If you ask orders you promise to wait for them. And there's wind and
snow and God knows what to cover up whatever the radar said fell down to the ground. If you wait
for orders, whatever fell will be covered past discovery by the time your orders come."