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

weather of this world. If this were a sample merely of morning winds, by mid-day existence should
be impossible. Stan looked at the chrono. He had slept less than three hours. He made a loop of line
from the abandon ship kit and got it about the nearest pillar. He drew himself to that tall column. He
tried to find a lee side, but there was none. The wind direction changed continually. He debated
struggling further under the shelter of the monstrous roof. He stared up, estimatingly—
He saw slabs tilt. In a giant section whose limits he could not determine, he saw the rectangular
sections of the roof revolve in strict unison. From a position parallel to the ground, they turned until
the light of the sky shone down unhindered. Vast masses of sand descended—deposited on the slabs
by the wind, and now dumped down about the columns' bases. Then wind struck anew with a
concentrated virulence, and the space between the columns became filled with a whirling giant eddy
that blotted out everything. It was a monster whirlwind that spun crazily in its place for minutes, and
then roared out to the open again. In its violence it picked Stan up bodily, with the skid and abandon
ship kit still clamped to his spacesuit. But for the rope about the column he would have been swept
away and tossed insanely into the smother of sand that reached to the horizon.
After a long time, he managed to take up some of the slack of the rope; to bind himself and his
possessions more closely to the column which rose into the smother overhead. Later still, he was able
to take up more. In an hour, he was bound tightly to the pillar and was no longer flung to and fro
by the wind. Then he dozed off again. It was uneasy slumber. It gave him little rest. Once a swirling
sand devil gouged away the ^and beneath him so that he and his geai hung an unguessable distance
above solidity, perhaps no more than a yard or so, but perhaps much more. Later he woke to find the
sand piling up swiftly about him, so that he had to loosen his rope and climb wearily as tons of tine,
abrasive stuff—it would have been strangling had he needed to breathe it direct—were flung upon
him. But he did sleep from time to tune.
Then night fell. The winds died down from hurricane intensity to no more than gale force. Then to
mere frantic gusts. Then—the sun had set on the farther side of the huge structure to which he had
tied himself—then there was a period when a fine whitish mist seemed to obscure all the stars. It
gradually faded, and he realized that it contained particles of so fine a dust that it hung in the air long
after the heavier stuff had settled.
He released himself from the rope about the pillar. He stood, a tiny figure beside the gargantual
columns of black metal which rose toward the stars. The stars themselves shone down brightly,
brittly, through utterly clear air. There were no traces of cloud formation following the storm of the
day. It was obvious that this was actually the normal weather of this planet. By day, horrific winds
and hurricanes. By night, a vast stillness. The small size and indistinctness of the icecap he had seen
was assurance that there was nowhere on the planet any sizable body of water to moderate the
weather. With such storms, inhabitants were unthinkable. Life of any sort was out of the question. But
if there were anything certain in the cosmos, it was that the structure at whose base he stood was
artificial!
He flicked on his suit radio. Static only. Sand particles in dry ah-, clashing against each other, would
develop changes to produce just the monstrous hissing sounds his earphones gave off. He flicked off
the radio and opened his face plate. Cold dry air filled his lungs.
There were no inhabitants. There could not be any. But there was this colossal artifact of unguessable
purpose. There was no life on this planet, but early during today's storm—and he suspected at other
times when he could neither see nor hear—huge areas of the roof plates had
turned together to dump down their accumulated loads of sand. As he breathed in the first breaths of
cold air, he heard a roaring somewhere within the forest of pillars. At a guess, it was another dumping
of sand from the roof. It stopped. Another roaring, somewhere else. Yet another. Section by section,
area by area, the sand that had piled on the roof at the top of the iron columns was dumped down
between the columns' bases.
Stan flicked on the tiny instrument lights and looked at the motor of the space skid. The needle was
against the pin at zero. He considered, and shrugged. Rob Torren would come presently to fight him