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

the hot gas reached the plasma state it broke the weak magnetic grip and fled out the pipe he had rigged
to the exterior vacuum.
"Don't you need some rest?" Elinor asked sympathetically as he let the power die.
"Maybe I do," Buzz said wearily as he turned and started suiting up. "I'll take a short nap. But first I
want Jan to check a few items in our own manuals."
Buzz stepped out of the small air lock into the bright light of Centauri G2, small at this distance but
otherwise similar to Sol. It had been early afternoon when they landed and they would be leaving just
before dark; the planetoid had an eighty-day rotation. The K5 companion was hidden on the other side
of this barren round rock, but Proxima was visible as a very bright star low on the horizon.
Instead of entering the shuttle immediately Buzz walked slowly around the tail of the wrecked ship,
noting again that at less than two hundred feet in length it was far shorter than the Interstellars, though
almost twice the diameter. There was a subtle alienness to the look and feel of the design that jarred on
the senses, making him realize there was a remarkable resemblance between the crudest stone ax and the
most modern hand tool; both were designed by and for humans. He wondered if it would be possible to
meet an extraterrestrial without deep-seated revulsion, without feeling unthinking, almost instinctive,
dislike.
Buzz saw nothing that would help him with his present problem, and finally entered the shuttle and
called Jan Alderman. There was just time enough for her to look up the items he wanted before the
interstellars passed below the horizon. The fact that the shuttle had fuel for only one more round trip, and
Ed insisted on reserving it for emergencies, was a nuisance. He needed several items they had not
brought down with them. But the entire expedition functioned under stringent limitations, as the space
program had from its inception. The huge weight of life support supplies and regenerative equipment left
little room for luxuries, or space fuel for a shuttle they might never have used.
Ed returned to the more roomy wreck while Jan was quoting the items Buzz wanted. Buzz learned
nothing that could help him, and changed the radio to suit-relay operation and followed Ed. In the spare
parts room, where Elinor had been working and where they slept for privacy, he shed his suit and lay
down on the improvised bunk. He was immediately wide awake, though still intensely tired, and had to
make a conscious effort to relax. The tall aliens had taken most of their spares with them, but several that
were left bothered him. The modular components, like the spare controllers, were easy enough to
understand, but the function of items such as the wrist-thick silvery rings with the hundreds of little disks
attached to the inside was a mystery. There were twenty-two of those rings, eighteen almost six feet in
diameter and two each of four feet and two feet. Their function, whatever it was, must belong to the
wrecked front end of the ship. He had seen nothing in the engine room that remotely resembled them.
Buzz realized he had been asleep when Elinor gently shook him awake. He staggered erect, ate the
concentrates she had warmed for him, and returned to the baffling fusion engine he was never going to
understand. It was small comfort to realize there were scientists on Earth busily working to reduce the
present huge hydrogen fusion machines, and in twenty years they might have one small enough to power
a ship. That vessel would be an ocean submarine tanker, not the first spaceship headed for Munich
15040.
The aliens' equivalent of a computer was located in the control room at the front of the ship, and had
been smashed into scrap. There was no other source of recorded information about the power supply.
Any printed sheets, or manuals, they possessed had gone back with them, leaving only the actual
machinery to work with. The problem had to be solved here and now or not at all.
Elinor moved past him to her position at the master control console. Marjorie Lord was the official
psychologist, but Elinor, her backup, was actually better at human relations and did more to keep
harmony among the six isolated humans. Buzz knew that, if the pressures of command caused Ed to lean
too heavily on the crew's physicist, Elinor would quietly speak to each man alone, in some intuitive
method, uniquely her own, easing the tension. Marjorie, recognizing ability that was real rather than
academic, had quickly yielded most of her mental health work to Elinor. She still performed the official
psychometric tests, and functioned as doctor and general helper to the others.