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

"See here Jonathan " said his father not unkindly. "Winter isn't far
away. Boats will be few and the surface fish will be swimming deep. If you
must study, then study food, and how to get it. This flying business is
all very well, but you can't eat a glide, you know. Don't you forget that
the reason you fly is to eat."
Jonathan nodded obediently. For the next few days he tried to behave
like the other gulls; he really tried, screeching and fighting with the
flock around the piers and fishing boats, diving on scraps of fish and
bread. But he couldn't make it work.
It's all so pointless, he thought, deliberately dropping a hard-won
anchovy to a hungry old gull chasing him. I could be spending all this
time learning to fly. There's so much to learn!


It wasn't long before Jonathan Gull was off by himself again, far out
at sea, hungry, happy, learning.
The subject was speed, and in a week's practice he learned more about
speed than the fastest gull alive.
From a thousand feet, flapping his wings as hard as he could, he
pushed over into a blazing steep dive toward the waves, and learned why
seagulls don't make blazing steep pewer-dives. In just six seconds he was
moving seventy miles per hour, the speed at which one's wing goes unstable
on the upstroke.
Time after time it happened. Careful as he was, working at the very
peak of his ability, he lost control at high speed.
Climb to a thousand feet. Full power straight ahead first, then push
over, flapping, to a vertical dive. Then, every time, his left wing
stalled on an upstroke, he'd roll violently left, stall his right wing
recovering, and flick like fire into a wild tumbling spin to the right.
He couldn't be careful enough on that upstroke. Ten times he tried,
and all ten times, as he passed through seventy miles per hour, he burst
into a churning mass of feathers, out of control, crashing down into the
water.
The key, he thought at last, dripping wet, must be to hold the wings
still at high speeds - to flap up to fifty and then hold the wings still.
From two thousand feet he tried again, rolling into his dive, beak
straight down, wings full out and stable from the moment he passed fifty
miles per hour. It took tremendous strength, but it worked. In ten seconds
he had blurred through ninety miles per hour. Jonathan had set a world
speed record for seagulls!
But victory was short-lived. The instant he began his pullout, the
instant he changed the angle of his wings, he snapped into that same
terrible uncontrolled disaster, and at ninety miles per hour it hit him
like dynamite. Jonathan Seagull exploded in midair and smashed down into a
brickhard sea.
When he came to, it was well after dark, and he floated in moonlight
on the surface of the ocean. His wings were ragged bars of lead, but the
weight of failure was even heavier on his back. He wished, feebly, that
the weight could be just enough to drug him gently down to the bottom, and
end it all.