The story “Under the Ice Sheet” is included in the collection “Sensation on Mars”.

Brief summary of the work (opening the spoiler - you only have yourself to blame!) The same: Under the title “Under the Ice Sheet”< /p>

“Under the Ice Sheet” (Pid Krizhanym Shield, 1971) is another story by Vasily Berezhny, written by him in 1969, in which the main character, misunderstood and persecuted, makes a great discovery. Nikifor Yarovoy became an apostate. He loved Clara, but he sought love for her in an assertive and incomprehensible way in 2300 for the Age of General Prosperity. He was a maximalist - it was all or nothing, and in his attempts to achieve Clara he did what was prohibited. He, as if going crazy, like an angry beast, invaded her house. There was something attractive in his wild love, but conventions prevented her from forgiving him. The World Council declares a boycott of Nikifor until his public apology. Even before this incident, Yarovoy had been working on the problem of reducing the Earth’s magnetic field, and when he was rejected, he tried to express his hypothesis of the origin of magnetic lines of force, which also contradicted plans to melt the ice sheet planets. In his opinion, the Earth’s magnetic field is supplied by some undiscovered substance, which is found in large reserves under the Antarctic ice sheet. An outcast with great willpower, he decides to prove himself right alone. His former love Clara, by the way, was just working in Antarctica, but her friend Vera, who was secretly in love with Nikifor, began to help him, and his wild impulses did not repel her at all, but for a very clear reason, on the contrary, attracted her. At the same time, Clara meets a man. The former astronaut who participated in the expedition to Uranus, whom Clara nicknamed Uranos, became very interested in her and her work. All these plot lines and moves intertwined in the finale of the story, where they converged at one point - a few meters from the Earth’s magnetic pole . Under a multi-kilometer ice sheet, in tunnels made by man, Nikifor discovers a huge cave, which was stuffed with a variety of mechanisms. As it turns out, this is the wheelhouse of our planet. The pilots of the ship called planet Earth either died or left it in ancient times, and their magnetic generator was still working. Ouranos turned out to be an alien, an inhabitant of the planet Uranus, who had the task of getting into this wheelhouse and transporting our planet closer to Uranus. Such a powerful magnetic generator was of considerable value for uranites. But his plans were not destined to come true. He is stopped by Nikifor and Vera, and the hero of the story dies.

© Vitaly Karatsupa, 2004-2009