"Gordon R. Dickson - Hilifter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

"Excuse me," he said, stepping up on the seat beside her. She moved
stiffly away from him. He unlatched the hatch overhead, pulled it down, and
went up through it. When he glanced back down through it, he saw her face
stiffly upturned to him.
He turned away and found himself in an equipment room. It was what he
had expected from the ship's plans he had memorized before coming
aboard. He went quickly out of the room and scouted the section.
As he had expected, there was no one at all upon this level. Weight and
space on interstellar liners being at the premium that they were, even a
steward like the one who had locked him in his cabin did double duty. In
overdrive, no one but the navigating officer had to do much of anything. But
in ordinary operation, there were posts for all ship's personnel, and all
ship's personnel were at them up in the Captain's Section at Control.
The stair hatch to this top and final section of the ship he found to be
closed as the rest. This, of course, was routine. He had not expected this to
be unlocked, though a few years back ships like this might have been that
careless. There were emergency hatches from this level as well, of course,
up to the final section. But it was no part of Cully's plan to come up in the
middle of a Control Room or a Captain's Section filled with young, active,
and almost certainly armed officers. The inside route was closed.
The outside route remained a possibility. Cully went down to the opposite
end of the corridor and found the entry port closed, but sealed only by a
standard lock. In an adjoining room there were outside suits. Cully spent a
few minutes with his picks, breaking the lock of the seal; and then went in to
put on the suit that came closest to fitting his six-foot-two frame.
A minute later he stepped out onto the outside skin of the ship.
As he watched the outer door of the entry port closing ponderously in the
silence of airless space behind him, he felt the usual inner coldness that
came over him at times like this. He had a mild but very definite phobia
about open space with its myriads of unchanging stars. He knew what
caused it тАУ several psychiatrists had told him it was nothing to worry about,
but he could not quite accept their unconcern. He knew he was a very lonely
individual, underneath it all; and subconsciously he guessed he equated
space with the final extinction in which he expected one day to disappear
and be forgotten forever. He could not really believe it was possible for
someone like him to make a dent in such a universe.
It was symptomatic, he thought now, plodding along with the magnetic
bootsoles of his suit clinging to the metal hull, that he had never had any
success with women тАУ like Lucy. A sort of bad luck seemed to put him
always in the wrong position with anyone he stood a chance of loving.
Inwardly, he was just as starry-eyed as Lucy, he admitted to himself, alone
with the vastness of space and the stars, but he'd never had much success
bringing it out into the open. Where she went all right, he seemed to go all
wrong. Well, he thought, that was life. She went her way and he would go
his. And it was probably a good thing.
 He looked ahead up the side of the ship, and saw the slight bulge of the
observation window of the Navigator's Section. It was just a few more steps
now.
Modern ships were sound insulated, thankfully, or the crew inside would
have heard his dragging footsteps on the hull. He reached the window and