Читать книгу The Naked Storm - Cyril M. Kornbluth - Страница 11
ОглавлениеSNOW
This is White Horse, Yukon Territory, Dominion of Canada. It is 750 miles south of the smelly little weather station on Point Anxiety, but in January it is still a frozen desolation. Here winterized B-50's land and take off endlessly, winterized jeeps and weasels crawl endlessly through the snow-plowed streets loaded with winterized Canadian and U. S. airmen.
A weatherman, perspiring in a shack overheated by its oil-drum stove, pushes back his R.C.A.F. cap and says: "Here comes a bloody blow, say the Yanks at Anxiety. Get the leftenant, will you?"
The lieutenant, a Ph.D. who never thought that specializing in the physics of the air would lead to the King's commission and duty in this godforsaken hole, studies the dispatch from Point Anxiety, studies several other dispatches and sketches a sinuous line in red on the big hemisphere map.
"Flash it on, Jock," he says. "I've got to go and tell the Air Commander."
Jock grins sympathetically and makes a curious cranking gesture like a machinist reaming out a drilled hole. The lieutenant nods wryly, squares his shoulders and leaves.
"Goddamn it, man!" the Air Commander says a few minutes later, "you weather people can't ground my planes for three days!"
"I know I can't sir," the lieutenant told him, "but that norther sure as hell can."
"But I've got twelve boys to qualify as multi-engine winterized pilots before February, familiarization courses for forty-three Yank interceptor pilots, the Parliamentary commission on my neck and the regular patrolling ... how much time have we?"
"We'll be zero-zero in six hours, sir. And snowbound in twelve."
The Air Commander mutters incoherently and waves the lieutenant from his office. The lieutenant grins in the corridor and goes to the radar room. There on the twelve-inch screen he can already see crawling down from the north a glowing, pale-green film which is the radar signal for snow--immense quantities of snow.
