"Bach, Richard - Jonathan Livingston Seagull" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bach Richard)

One who has touched excellence in his learning has no need of that kind of
promise.
By sunup, Jonathan Gull was practicing again. From five thousand feet
the fishing boats were specks in the flat blue water, Breakfast Flock was
a faint cloud of dust motes, circling.
He was alive, trembling ever so slightly with delight, proud that his
fear was under control. Then without ceremony he hugged in his forewings,
extended his short, angled wingtips, and plunged direcfly toward the sea.
By the time he passed four thousand feet he had reached terminal velocity,
the wind was a solid beating wall of sound against which he could move no
faster. He was flying now straight down, at two hundred fourteen miles per
hour. He swallowed, knowing that if his wings unfolded at that speed be'd
be blown into a million tiny shreds of seagull. But the speed was power,
and the speed was joy, and the speed was pure beauty.
He began his pullout at a thousand feet, wingtips thudding and
blurring in that gigatitic wind, the boat and the crowd of gulls tilting
and growing meteor-fast, directly in his path.
He couldn't stop; he didn't know yet even how to turn at that speed.
Collision would be instant death.
And so he shut his eyes.
It happened that morning, then, just after sunrise, that Ionathan
Livingston Seagull fired directly through the center of Breakfast Flock,
ticking off two hundred twelve miles per hour, eyes closed, in a great
roaring shriek of wind and feathers. The Gull of Fortune smiled upon him
this once, and no one was killed.
By the time he had pulled his beak straight up into the sky he was
still scorching along at a hundred and sixty miles per hour. When he had
slowed to twenty and stretched his wings again at last, the boat was a
crumb on the sea, four thousand feet below.
His thought was triumph. Terminal velocity! A seagull at two hundred
fourteen miles per hour! It was a breakthrough, the greatest single moment
in the history of the Flock, and in that moment a new age opened for
Jonathan Gull. Flying out to his lonely practice area, folding his wings
for a dive from eight thousand feet, he set himself at once to discover
how to turn.
A single wingtip feather, he found, moved a fraction of an inch,
gives a smooth sweeping curve at tremendous speed. Before he learned this,
however, he found that moving more than one feather at that speed will
spin you like a ritIe ball... and Jonathan had flown the first aerobatics
of any seagull on earth.
He spared no time that day for talk with other gulls, but flew on
past sunset. He discovered the loop, the slow roll, the point roll, the
inverted spin, the gull bunt, the pinwheel.


When Jonathan Seagull joined the Flock on the beach, it was full
night. He was dizzy and terribly tired. Yet in delight he flew a loop to
landing, with a snap roll just before touchdown. When they hear of it, he
thought, of the Breakthrough, they'll be wild with joy. How much more
there is now to living! Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the