"Murray Leinster - Planet of Sand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

He started the minute gyroscopes that enabled him to steer the skid. He started hi toward the sun. He
had a planet to find and land on. Of course, Rob Torren could simply have contrived his escape to
emptiness so that he might die and shrivel hi the void, and never, never, never through all eternity be
found again. But somehow, Stan had a vast faith in the hatred which existed between the two of them.
2
IT WAS TWO days later when he approached the solitary planet of Khor Alpha. The air in his spacesuit
had acquired that deadly staleness which is proof that good air is more than merely a mixture of
oxygen and nitrogen. He felt sluggish discomfort which comes of bottled, repurified breathing
mixture. As the disk of the planet grew large, he saw little or nothing to make him feel more cheerful.
The planet rotated as he drew near, and it seemed to be absolutely featureless. The terminator—the
shadow line as sunlight encroached on the planet's night side—was a perfect line. There were, then,
no mountains. There were no clouds. There seemed to be no vegetation. There was, though, a tiny
polar icecap—so small that at first he did not discover it. It was not even a dazzling white, but a mere
whitishness where a polar cap should be, as if it were hoar frost instead of ice.
He went slanting down to match the planet's ground speed hi his approach. Astride the tiny space
skid, he looked rather like an improbable witch astride an incredible broomstick. And he was very,
very tired.
Coming up in a straight line, half the planet's disk was night. Half the day side was hidden by the
planet's bulge.
He actually saw no more than a quarter of the surface at this near approach, and that without
magnification. Any large features would have been spotted from far away, but he had given up hope
of any variation from monotony when —just as he was about to enter the atmosphere—one dark
patch hi the planet's uniformly dazzling white surface appeared at the very edge of day. It was at the
very border of the dawn belt. He could only be sure of its existence, and that it had sharp, specifically
straight edges. He saw rectangular extensions from the main mass of it Then he hit atmosphere, and
the thin stuff thrust at him violently because of his velocity, and he blinked and automatically turned
his head aside, so that he did not see the dark patch again before his descent put it below the horizon.
Even so near, no features, no natural formations appeared. There was only a vast brightness below
him. He could make no guess as to his height nor—after he had slowed until the wind against his
body was not detectable through the spacesuit—of his speed with relation to the ground. It was
extraordinary. It occurred to him to drop something to get some idea, even if a vague one, of his
altitude above the ground.
He did, an oil soaked rag from the tool kit. It went fluttering down and down—and abruptly vanished,
relatively a short distance below him. It had not landed. It had been blotted out.
Tired as he was, it took him minutes to think of turning on the suit microphone which would enable
him to hear sounds hi this extraordinary world. But when he flicked the switch he heard a dull,
droning, moaning noise which was unmistakable. Wind. Below him there was a sandstorm. He was
riding just above its upper surface. He could not see the actual ground because there was an opaque
wall of sand between. There might be five hundred feet between him and solidity, or five thousand, or
there might be no actual solid, immovable ground at all. In any case, he could not possibly land.
He rose again and headed for the dark area he had noted. But a space skid is not intended for use in
atmosphere. Its power is great, to be sure, when its power unit is filled. But Stan had come a very
long way indeed since his departure from the Stallifer. And his drive had blown a fuse, once,
which cost him power. Unquestionably, the blown fuse had been caused by the impinging of a
Bowdoin-Hall field upon the skid. Some other space ship that the Stallifer, using Khor Alpha as a
course guide, had flashed past the one planet system at many hundred tunes the speed of light. The
pulsations of its drive field had struck the skid and drained its drive of power, and unquestionably had
registered the surge. But it was not likely that it would be linked with Stan's disappearance. The other
ship might be headed for a star system which was light centuries from Earth, and a minute—relatively
minute—joggte of its meters would not be a cause for comment. The real seriousness of the affair was