"Ben Bova - The Kinsman Saga" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

"Right enough."

Power. And freedom. Six miles above the tired, wrinkled
old Earth. Six miles away from everything and everybody. It
3

couldn't last long enough to suit him.

Ahead lay San Francisco and his mother's funeral.
Ahead lay death and his father's implacable anger.

Life at the Air Force Academy was rigid, cold. A
first-year cadet was expected to obey everybody's orders, not
make friends. No matter that you're older than the other
first-year men. A rich boy, huh? Spent two years in a fancy
prep school, huh? Well, snap to, mister! Let me see four
chins, moneybags! Four of 'em!

Yet that was better- than going home.

His father had refused to stop off in Colorado when he
had taken his ailing wife from their estate in Pennsylvania to
her sister's home in San Francisco. And Kinsman had delayed
taking leave to visit his mother there. Time enough for that
later, after his father had gone back East to return to running
his banks.

Then, suddenly, unalterably, she was dead. And his
father was still there.

Instead of taking a commercial airliner. Kinsman had
begged a ride with a westward-heading Air Force captain.

If t'were done, he told himself, t'were best done quickly.

Now he was flying. Free and happy.

Suddenly the plane's nose dipped and Kinsman felt his
pressure suit begin to squeeze the air out of him. His arms
became too heavy to lift. His head felt as if it would sink down
inside his rib cage. He could hear the pilot's breath, over the
open mike, rasping in long, regular panting grunts, like a man
doing pushups, and Kinsman realized he was breathing hard
too. They were diving toward the desert, which now looked as
flat and hard and gray as steel. The pressure suit squeezed
harder. Kinsman could not speak.

"Try a low-level run," the pilot gasped, between breaths.
"Get a real . . . feeling of speed."