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

Gail looked at him with interest, with confidence.
"What will you do, then?"
"I think," said Soames, "we'll find it and then report."
"But..."
"You," said Soames, "have a penguin story blocked
out. I'm to pilot you in a helicopter, tomorrow, to a penguin rookery fifty miles down the coast
where the Barrier breaks up. You were planning a cozy little article on Housewives of the
Antarctic: The Care and Feeding of one's Penguin Husband. Right?"
Gail grinned suddenly. "I see. Yes. That's a good title."
"We take off in the 'copter," said Soames. "We start out ostensibly to gather material for an
article on Can This Penguin Marriage be Saved. But we'll be blown off course. We'll find ourselves
quite accidentally where the radar said there was the great-grandfather of static bursts, with a
ground-shock and a concussion-wave to boot. We may even be blown farther, to where something dived
downward for four or five miles and vanished below the horizon."
Captain Moggs said uneasily, "Most irregular. But it might be wise."
"Of course," said Soames. "It's always safer to report something you've found than not find
something you've reported. Besides, the thing we'd report-there can't be any such thing."
"But you've some idea what it is!" protested Gail.
"My mind is full," admitted Soames, "of things that can't be. I don't know of anything it could
be."
"No spaceship?" she asked.
"I'm not that much of a pessimist," he told her, grinning. "But we'd better look and see."
"We start at sunrise," said Captain Moggs authoritatively.
"Make it after breakfast," suggested Soames mildly. "One should never challenge destiny on an
empty stomach."
Gail smiled warmly at him as he showed them out of the radar-dome. He saw them greeted at the exit
by Rex, the large and untidy dog who was the base's official mascot. Rex considered himself as
much a person as anybody else; and hence entitled to choose his company. He'd been waiting for


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Gail. He'd adored her from the hour of her arrival. He frisked about her as she started back
toward the base's main building. Soames went back to the radar.
As he looked at it, it picked out something a little smaller than a marble at a height of seventy-
nine miles and followed that incredibly ancient, small wanderer of space down to its spectacular
suicide by fire at a height of thirty-four miles.
He turned up the inter-base short-wave speaker. An almost hysterical voice snapped bitterly that
the burst of impossible static proved that the Americans were trying out dreadful devices in the
frozen wilderness of the Antarctic. There were references to Wall Street, and to warmongering, and
other familiar ideas. It was not remarkable. Since progress in science had come to mean progress
in the ability to blow people up, there was a tendency to emotional reaction even among alleged
scientists. Soames found himself thinking queasily that since it was pure chance that his radar
had picked up the inexplicable side-effects of the static-burst,' it might truly be challenging
destiny to carry on the investigation.
He painstakingly checked over the radar. It worked perfectly. The taped record of its observations
carried the story of all that Gail and Captain Moggs and he had seen. Machinery may err, but it
does not have delusions. It would have to be subject to systematic hallucinations to have reported
and recorded what this radar insisted was the truth.