"Adams, Douglas -hitchhikers guide to the galaxy part 5" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Douglas)

Just before it blanked out for the final time, the ship realised
that its engines were beginning to give out too.
The ship and its revived and confused crew coasted on under
the control of its subsidiary automatic systems, which simply
looked to land wherever they could find to land and monitor
whatever they could find to monitor.
As far as finding something to land on was concerned, they
didn't do very well. The planet they found was desolately cold
and lonely, so achingly far from the sun that should warm it, that
it took all of the Envir-O-Form machinery and LifeSupport-O-
Systems they carried with them to render it, or at least enough
parts of it, habitable. There were better planets nearer in, but
the ship's Strateej-O-Mat was obviously locked into Lurk mode
and chose the most distant and unobtrusive planet and, further-
more, would not be gainsaid by anybody other than the ship's
Chief Strategic Officer. Since everybody on the ship had lost
their minds no one knew who the Chief Strategic Officer was
or, even if he could have been identified, how he was supposed
to go about gainsaying the ship's Strateej-O-Mat.
As far as finding something to monitor was concerned, though,
they hit solid gold.


Chapter 2

One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places
it's prepared to put up with living. Anywhere it can get some
kind of a grip, whether it's the intoxicating seas of Santraginus
V, where the fish never seem to care whatever the heck kind
of direction they swim in, the fire storms of Frastra where, they
say, life begins at 40,000 degrees, or just burrowing around in
the lower intestine of a rat for the sheer unadulterated hell of
it, life will always find a way of hanging on in somewhere.
It will even live in New York, though it's hard to know why.
In the winter time the temperature falls well below the legal
minimum, or rather it would do if anybody had the common
sense to set a legal minimum. The last time anybody made a
list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers,
common sense snuck in at number 79.
In the summer it's too darn hot. It's one thing to be the sort
of life form that thrives on heat and finds, as the Frastrans do,
that the temperature range between 40,000 and 40,004 is very
equable, but it's quite another to be the sort of animal that has
to wrap itself up in lots of other animals at one point in your
planet's orbit, and then find, half an orbit later, that your skin's
bubbling.
Spring is over-rated. A lot of the inhabitants of New York
will honk on mightily about the pleasures of spring, but if they
actually knew the first thing about the pleasures of spring they
would know of at least five thousand nine hundred and eighty-