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

"An implosion," said Soames. "And if you have trouble imagining that, I'm right there with you."
He went back to the main building and breakfast. He looked on sardonically as Gail sat at the
table surrounded by eagerly admiring staff members who'd seen only each other and supply-plane
crewmen for months past. Gail didn't look in the least like a staff member or a supply-plane
pilot. In fact, fourteen beards had been shaved off since her arrival, without making any of the
staff look very much like Gail. She was very good to look at.
He ate morosely. When the meal was done the three of them, Soames and Gail and Captain Moggs, went
out to the 'copter hangar together. The hangar originally had been a shed on top of the ice. Now
its roof was scarcely two feet above the surface, and a snow-ramp led up to the bitterly cold,
wind-swept take-off space. The supply plane would have blocked its use as a runway, but it
wouldn't need to be moved out of the way for a 'copter launching.
"I've talked to the radar and loran operator," said Soames. "I explained that you wanted to see
some
crevasses from the air, and that I'd be wandering~around looking for them on the way to the
rookery. ~ will check on us every fifteen minutes, anyhow."
Gail asked, "Have you thought of anything the-thing might be?"
"I've less than no idea," admitted Soames. "All I could think of was more things it can't be. The
geophysics boys have something to worry about too. It seems the ground-shock waves came in front
part hindmost. And there aren't supposed to be any such waves. But the seismQgraph says there are.
The thing made 'em."
He helped her up into the 'copter's cabin. Their hands touched. He tried to ignore the fact, but
Gail glanced at him quickly.
The 'copter went up the long, sloping, bulldozed snow-ramp. Soames checked his radio contact. He
nodded. The engines hummed and roared and bellowed, and the ship lifted deliberately and floated
away over the icy waste.
A 'copter ride does not feel like any other kind of airborne travel. One moves slowly by
comparison with planes, and a side-wind makes a great difference between the heading of the ship
and the way the ground moves beneath it. One seems to be traveling out of control, sliding around
the sky with no particular direction. The feeling is only an illusion, but still disturbing.
The motors droned and droned. The 'buildings of the base dwindled in size. Presently they were
very small and very far behind. To the left the sea appeared. It looked even colder than the ice
which covered everything solid.
"This is a thrill," said Gail in Soames' ear over the motor-noise. "I like to think it could be a
spaceship we're going to find!"
"I'd prefer anything else," said Soames. "Anything!" The base seemed to drift away back to the
very horizon. Soames swung the ship to the right, to the south. It went winging on over whiteness,
a thousand feet high. Below was nothing but snow. No sign showed that any human being had ever
trodden the surface beneath them. Nobody ever had. But no sign showed
that any living thing at all had ever glimpsed the terrain beneath them.
The tiny droning thiRg was infinitely lonely in the empty sky, above a bndscape that had never
known a growing thing. There was only one spot in two thousand miles where human beings were to be
found. That spot was the South Pole itself. Beyond it lay vast deserts of snow and the towering
ramparts of icy mountains, colossal plateaus many thousands of feet high over which incredibly
cold winds blew furiously. The little helicopter was, very much alone.
Soames flew carefully, checking wind-drift by the shadows of ice-spires in the waste beneath.
Twice he murmured briefly into his radio microphone. Each time his estimated position checked with
the radar. The third time he was out of radar range for his altitude. He rose steeply until the
radar picked him up again. His position checked.
"I'm going down now," he told the base. "Hunting crevasses."
He let the 'copter descend. The waste was featureless then and for a seemingly interminable time