"Joseph Green - Wrong Attitude" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Joseph)

"You're the physicist, Buzz. Can we make it go?" Ed Alderman asked, his deep bass voice
deliberately reasonable and friendly.
Buzz Baxter tilted his lean frame back in the too-tall and narrow control chair in weary patience. He
was bone-tired and irritated, but the thought that he had to accept orders from Ed for six more years
kept him civil. "I honestly don't know. This is a smaller fusion engine than we thought possible, and
according to what I know of plasma confinement it can't work. Presumably it does, somehow. I need
more time."
Ed gave him a cool, level stare. He was the only member of the team with a military background,
apparently the reason he had been selected as commander of the first interstellar expedition. He had also
taken a minor in physics, making him back-up man to Buzz in that field. But they had discovered in their
first year out that the preflight psych matching tests were faulty. The short astronaut and the tall physicist
got along best at a respectful distance. There had been no major problems during the six slow years they
crawled toward Alpha Centauri, but Buzz often felt that was only because Interstellar B was available to
each married couple every third week. He and Elinor, and Ed and Jan occupied the A spacecraft
together only one week in three.
"Buzz, you know we have just four more days. After that it's short meals and reduced oxygen all the
way back. Marjorie says positively no, her tests show our group stability factor as just above the red line
now. We leave on schedule, with or without understanding this confounded miniature power system.
And, with no profit to show, we just may be the first and last expedition. Can I help you in any way?"
Buzz shook his head immediately, and saw that the quickness of the rejection jarred Ed. But there
was no point in bringing in another person who knew less than himself; Elinor provided all the physical
help he needed. Her work as expedition biologist was over. She had taken numerous soil samples from
the surrounding area, thoroughly searched the broken ship, and photographed and measured every
personal use artifact she could reach. Neither on planetoid or ship was there any trace of life. She had
been assisting her husband for the past three days.
"All right; I'm going to send the daily report up to Jan." Ed pulled on his helmet and turned toward the
air lock. Buzz knew their commander wanted some encouraging news for Jan, who would start it on its
four-year journey to Earth. He watched Ed enter and manually close the inner door. The fact that the
engine room had its own air lock was a lucky break for them, and a good indication of the differences in
thought patterns. Humans would never have installed two air locks on such a small spaceship.
Elinor returned from what they had decided was the spare parts room, carrying her camera. Her long
brown hair was pulled into a severe ponytail, and there was a smear of dust on her left cheek. "All
through with the recording and inventory," she said, in the low voice that always soothed his taut nerves.
"Ed seems to be getting a little impatient with us. Sure you shouldn't have let him help?"
"I'm sure. Let's recheck the circuitry in our patchbox and make another run."
Elinor took the meter leads and started checking the contacts he indicated. It had taken Buzz two
weeks to isolate the drive and its master console, tie in a battery from their shuttle for control power, and
activate the unit. Now the drive's moving parts, primarily a series of control rods, moved smoothly back
and forth in their cylindrical vacuum chamber. He could even release deuterium and start the heating
process that would turn it into a plasma. And there he had stalled, completely lost. The alien's magnetic
field was totally inadequate, and he could see no way to strengthen it. Long before the hydrogen heated
to the required 80 million degrees Kelvin it blew away in tattered streamers. There was something basic
in the operation of this device he did not understand.
Buzz confirmed Elinor's quietly spoken checks with low grunts, his mind elsewhere. They had used
up their allotment of luck; now they had to depend on ability. After six slow years of flight the two
spaceships had passed by Proxima Centauri closely enough to be certain it had no planets of any size,
and found only scattered rocks around the KS component of the twin suns. They had spotted this
unnamed planetoid slightly smaller than Earth's moon, circling in lonely elliptical orbit 120 million miles
out, when they approached the G2 star. Far too small to possess an atmosphere, it had seemed only a
barren sphere of rock, but they had orbited and started scanning because it was the only solid body of