"James E. Gunn - Breaking Point" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gunn James E)

niches flanking the console. Johnny touched a control that freed his chair in its hydraulic gimbals. Chair
and niches and shock-panels would not be needed as long as the artificial gravity and inertialess field
functioned; it was a ritual.

The ship skimmed treetops, heading phlegmatically for a rocky bluff. A gush of flame from its underjets
and it shouldered heavily upward, just missing the jagged crest. A gout of fire forward, another, and it
went into a long flat glide, following the fall of a foothill to the plain beyond. It held course and reduced
speed, letting the ground billow up to it rather than descending. There was a moment of almost-flight,
almost-sliding, and then a rush of dust and smoke which over-took and passed them. When it cleared,
they were part of the plain, part of the planet.

"A good landing, John," Paresi said. Hoskins caught his eye and frowned. Paresi grinned broadly, and the
exchange between them was clear: Why do you needle the kid? and Quiet, Engine-room. I know
what I'm doing. Hoskins shrugged, and, with Ives, crossed to the communications desk.

Ives ran his fat, skilled hands over the controls and peered at his indicators. "It's more than a good
landing," he grunted. "That squeak-box we homed in on can't be more than a hundred meters from here.
First time I've ever seen a ship bullseye like that."

Johnny locked his gimbals, ran a steady, sensitive hand over the turn of the console as if it were a
woman's flank. "WhyтАФhow close do you usually come?"

"Planetfall's close enough to satisfy Survey," said the Captain. "Once in a while the box will materialize
conveniently on a continent. But thisтАФthis is too good to be true. We practically landed on it."

Hoskins nodded. "It's usually buried in some jungle, or at the bottom of a sea. But this is really all right.
What a lineup! Point nine-eight earth gravity, Earth-type atmosphereтАФ"

"Argon-rich," said, Ives, from the panel. "Very rich."[Pg 11]

"That'll make no real difference," Hoskins went on. "Temperature, about normal for an early summer
back home ... looks as if there's a fiendish plot afoot here to make things easy for us."

Paresi said, as if to himself, "I worry about easy things."




"Yeah, I know," snorted Johnny, rising to stretch. "The head-shrinker always does it the hard way. You
can't just dislike rice pudding; it has to be a sister-syndrome. If the shortest distance is from here to there,
don't take itтАФremember your Uncle Oedipus."

Captain Anderson chuckled. "Cut your jets, Johnny. Maybe Paresi's tortuous reasoning does seem out of
order on such a nice day. But rememberтАФeternal vigilance isn't just the price of liberty, as the old books
say. It's the price of existence. We know we're hereтАФbut we don't know where 'here' is, and won't until
after we get back. This is really Terra Incognita. The location of Earth, or even of our part of the galaxy,
is something that has to be concealed at all costs, until we're sure we're not going to turn up a potentially
dangerous, possibly superior alien culture. What we don't know can't hurt Earth. No conceivable method
could get that information out of us, any more than it could be had from the squeak-box that Survey
dropped here.