"David Grinnell- To Venus! To Venus!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grinnell David)

target. Jim had been fulfilling his assignment of cruising the surface in the
ungainly looking but very efficient moonwalker when the machine had
suddenly stopped operating. Chet hoped to get it restarted.

His right earphone received the wavelength of the mother ship, which
would eventually take everybody back to Earth. It took a bit of getting
used to, this business of receiving two channels simultaneously, but it had
been covered in the intensive training he had received, and now he could
listen to two conversations at the same time and make sense of both. The
microphone in his helmet beamed his words to the mother ship, which
received them and relayed them back over the entire lunarscape or even,
when desired, back to Earthbase.

Chet figured that at the present rate he would be at the top of the
crater's ridge in just under two hours, and from there it would be a
downhill slide until he reached the moonwalker. He had no way of being
sure exactly what had caused it to stop working because Jim, although an
excellent geologist, was absolutely hopeless when it came to anything
mechanical. If it was the shearpin, as Chet guessed, he would have it
operating again within fifteen minutes of his arrival. If it was anything
else, he would have to run a series of tests and hope he found the source of
the trouble quickly and that it would not involve some unobtainable part.

As he panted his way up the steep cliff, Chet was surprised to find that
uppermost in his mind was not the failure of the mission if he was unable
to repair the moonwalker; his immediate attention was occupied by the
discouraging possibility of having to hike all the way back to his point of
origin in order to be picked up by the mother ship. Since he was in no
mood to concentrate on so unpleasant a prospect, he fixed his mind on the
broadcasts from Earth which were being rediffused into his left earphone.
As often happened, Earthbase was relaying the international news
broadcast:

"It was officially announced in Moscow today that a team of
cosmonauts headed by Commander Raffalovich has effected a landing on
the planet Venus."

Chet snorted. He had long ago learned to withhold judgment on first
hearing any news which officially proclaimed a great Russian
breakthrough. It was true that they had accomplished a great deal. One
could never forget that they had been the first of Earth's nations to achieve
space orbit. Nevertheless, it was just as true that they had often
announced spectacular achievements which later turned out to be of
minor substance. This story could mean that an orbiting mothership
captained by Raffalovich had sent an unmanned probe on to the Venusian
surface, or they might be claiming the actual setting foot of cosmonauts
on Earth's neighbor. This would indeed be spectacular. Even if the
explorers never left the ship, their very presence on Venusian soil would
constitute an impressive first.