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

that the skid had drained power before its fuse blew.
That property of a Bowdoin-Hall field, incidentally— its trick of draining power from any drive unit
in its range— is the reason that hampers its use save in deep space. Liners have to be elaborately
equipped with fuses lest in shorting each other's drive they wreck their own. In interplanetary work,
fuses are not even practical because they might be blown a hundred times in a single voyage. Within
solar systems high frequency pulsations are used, so that no short can last more than the hundred-
thousandth of a second, in which not even allotropic graphite can be ruined.
Stan, then, was desperately short of power and had to use it in a gravitational field which was
prodigally wasteful of it. He had to rise high above the sandstorm before he saw the black area again
at the planet's very rim. He headed for it in the straightest of straight lines. As he drove, the power
gauge needle flickered steadily over toward zero. A meteor miner does not often use as much as one
earth gravity acceleration, and Stan had to use that much merely to stay aloft. The black area, too, was
all of a hundred-odd miles away, and after some millions of miles of space travel, the skid was hard
put to make it.
He dived for the black thing as it drew near, and on his approach it appeared simply impossible. It
was a maze, a grid, of rectangular girders upholding a seemingly infinite number of monstrous dead-
black slabs. There was a single layer of those slabs, supported by innumerable spiderly slender
columns. Here, in the dawnbelt, there was no wind and Stan could see clearly. Sloping down, he saw
that ten-
foot columns of some dark metal rose straight and uncompromising from a floor of sand to the height
of three hundred feet or more. At their top was the grid and the slabs, forming a roof some thirty
stories above the ground. There were no underfloors, no crossways, no structural features of any sort
between the sand from which the columns rose and that queer and discontinuous roof.
Stan landed on the ground at the structure's edge. He could see streaks and bars of sky between the
slabs. He looked down utterly empty aisles between the corridors and saw nothing but the columns
and the roof until the shafts merged in the distance. There was utter stillness here. The sand was
untroubled and undisturbed. If the structure were a shelter, it sheltered nothing. Yet it stretched for at
least a hundred miles in at least one direction, as he had seen from aloft. As nearly as he could tell,
there was no reason for its existence and no purpose it could serve. Yet it was not the abandoned
skeleton of something no longer used. It was plainly in perfect repair. The streaks of sky to be seen
between its sections were invariably exact in size and alignment. They were absolutely uniform.
There was no delapidation and no defect anywhere. The whole structure was certainly artificial and
certainly purposeful, and it implied enormous resources of civilization. But there was no sign of its
makers, and Stan could not even guess at the reason for its construction.
But he was too worn out to guess. On board the Staltifer, he'd been so sick with rage that he could not
rest. On the space skid, riding in an enormous loneliness about a dwarf sun whose single planet had
never been examined by men, he had to be alert. He had to find the system's one planet, and then he
had to make a landing with practically no instruments. When he landed at the base of the huge grid,
he examined his surroundings wearily, but with the cautious suspicion needful on an unknown world.
Then he made the sort of camp the situation seemed to call for. He clamped the space skid and his
supplies to his spacesuit belt, lay down hard by one of the columns, and incontinently fell asleep.
He was wakened by a horrific roaring in his earphones. He lay still for one instant. When he tried to
stir, it was only with enormous difficulty that he could move his arms and
legs. He felt as if he were gripped by quicksand. Then suddenly, he was wide awake. He fought
himself free of clinging incumbrances. He had been half-buried in sand. He was in the center of a
roaring swirling sand devil which broke upon the nearby column and built up mounds of sand and
snatched them away again, and flung great masses crazily ha every direction.
As the enigmatic structure had moved out of the dawn belt into the morning, howling winds had
risen. All the fury of a tornado, all the stifling deadliness of a sandstorm, beat upon the base of the
grid. And from what Stan had seen when he first tried to land, this was evidently the normal daily