Читать книгу The Naked Storm - Cyril M. Kornbluth - Страница 8

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It's Point Anxiety, Alaska, a miserable ice-covered promontory of the northern coast. Three airmen in a corrugated-iron shack which sprouts tall radio masts are the total population. They are young, because young men resist the cold best; older men tend to get frozen gums if they step outside.

All three are volunteers. One wants the extra money for the hardship duty; he's going to open a cleaning shop in Cincinnati when he gets out; he already has $3,752 in his postal savings account. Another's motive is religious; he is fighting the antichrist by serving devotedly and well in the most difficult and disagreeable post he can find. The third is a kind-hearted young man who happens to be a "situational murderer." A field hand scared his sister, he went to have a talk with the buck and before he knew it the field hand was dying of a fractured skull. His pastor and the sheriff were understanding; no purpose would be served by spoiling his young life over an accident that could have happened to anybody. But they thought he'd better get out of the county for a while in case snoopers turned up with questions. He got out; way out.

The three young men play poker endlessly; it is hard for them to communicate in any other way. The cleaner-and-dyer-to-be could tell them about spotting with KMnO₄, about steaming velveteens, about his revolutionary idea for three-color plastic advertising garment hangers, but they would only smile blankly and ask if he wanted some coffee. The religious young man could hardly share with them his dawning discovery there in the Arctic waste that he had a vocation; they would not even recognize the word. And the third young man's horizon was entirely bounded by the raising of soybeans, the training of hound dogs, the protection of womanhood.

They went through basic training at Sampson Air Force Base on Lake Cayuga in New York; being intelligent, they were forwarded to the Weather Technician School at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. There, in six grinding months, they learned to operate the complex radio and meteorological equipment which surrounds them here as they play poker.

An urgent beep-beep-beep from one of the radio receivers breaks into a three-dollar pot. They put down their hands automatically and get to work. They release balloons and follow them across the lead-colored sky with telescopes that give bearing and elevation at one-second intervals. They set the figures on a special circular slide-rule as big as a table-top, adding in temperature, wind velocity and barometric pressure. They shoot the result by radio to the big base at White Horse, Yukon Territory. It takes them about an hour, and then they pick up their poker hands again.

One of them draws to four hearts and fills his flush. His fatal poker habit is talking to hide his excitement over a good hand. "That's a son of a bitch coming up," he says.

The others, who know his fatal habit, feel relieved and drop their hands. They pick up the conversation and agree that it is indeed a bad son of a bitching norther rolling down from the Arctic Ocean.

They shuffle and deal again while the leaden sky outside flowers down and a small shrill wind blows hard from the ocean, bringing with it the first snowflakes of the norther.