"Williamson-DarkStarOne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

seen his dripping blood, become un buen amigo. She was still the Anglo stranger
who hardly knew he was alive, but perhaps if he could earn a place among these
pioneers of the stars --

Perhaps.

A sharp jolt bought him back to the frost and the boulders. Fragments of broken
ice scattered the pale ruby glow around him. He rubbed his eyes and found more
fragments emerging from the starlight ahead, always larger until they became a
barrier along the starlit horizon.

A sharper jolt. The scout rocked and dropped.

"Carlos?" Cruzet shouted from the cabin. "What hit us?"

He braked the scout to search his small red island. The vehicle had dropped off
a ledge half a meter high, hidden under the frost.

"We fell." He pointed at the ledge. "A drop I didn't see."

"A fracture." Andersen stood peering over his shoulder. "The old sea is frozen
to the bottom. Ice here can fracture like any rock." He turned to scan the
boulder wall ahead. "Ejecta," he said. "From a meteor crater. We'll get around
it. And then --"

He stopped himself, but his craggy face had lit.

"An adventure I never expected." He swung to grin at Cruzet. "You know I began
in geology. Switched to astrophysics because our old Earth was known too well.
Now this whole planet's ours. A new geology for us to read!"

"Ours?" Cruzet stood with him, staring off into the east, where they thought the
flash had been. "Are you sure?"

Andersen went back to keep the fusion engine running.

"My turn to drive." Cruzet beckoned Mondragon away from the wheel. "Get some
sleep."

He crawled into his berth in the main cabin. Hinch was snoring behind the
curtain, but he couldn't sleep. Cuerno del Oro was too far away, the world of
the ice gods too cold and dark and strange. He climbed again into the
observation bubble. Cruzet had steered north to find a way around the crater.

The frost beyond lay flat again, white and flat to the black horizon. Ice and
midnight, nada mas.

He sat at the instrument board, staring out across that dead starlit infinity,
till the chime of the watch clock roused him to read the temperature of the
surface radiation and enter it in the log. He used the sextant, as Andersen had