"James E. Gunn - Station In Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gunn James E)

Out there was his reality.

Within a few hours he would step out onto the vast concrete landing strip at Cocoa, Florida.

It was the beginning of the great adventure.

General Finch was shockingly old and ill. Amos compared the reality with the pictures at the Academy:
the General shaking hands with Pickrell, facing the Senate subcommittee, giving a memorial wreath to an
anonymous pilot to place in orbit for all those men who had given their lives. . .

But then General Beauregard Finch was an old man, four years past retirement age, almost seventy.

The six years since McMillen's fatal flight had aged the General, but with them he had built his own
monument. Above him circled the Doughnut to which he had sacrificed his health, his lifeтАФas other men
had sacrificed their health and their lives.

It was worth it. It was the dream.

In the little waiting room near the platform, the General stood, still straight, still wearing proudly the
honorary Doughnut insignia on his shoulder. "You're going out there, Danton, taking with you all our
honor, all our pride. We've never sent out a bad one, a coward or a fool. I don't think we've started
now. Only a few men have preceded you. Only a few will follow. It will always be a hard, lonely business
out there. But there's nothing more worth the doing."

The General had never been out there. By the time it was possible, he was, too old.

"What do they call you nowтАФyou cadet replacements?"

"Pick's pick, sir."

"Good enough. That's what you areтАФpicked men, selected and sorted and pruned, over and over. The
best of the best. You've had the finest training we could give you. Remember though: it's never
enoughтАФthe picking or the training. The job is always bigger than the man. What you've gone through is
nothing to what is waiting for you."

Amos smiled politely. The General could call it nothing, the Academy selection and training program: he
had never been through it. Knowing it now, Amos could not have forced himself to go through it again:
the unceasing torment of brain and body, the endless tests of physical and psychological endurance, the
perpetual cramming of an infinite amount of information into a finite brain. . .

Call it nothing. Call it five years of hell.

Out of 50,000 applications, 1,000 had been accepted. After the intense physical and psychiatric tests,
sixty were left.

They received their reward: five years of training. Five years fighting the books, of takingg's in the
centrifuge while trying to function as a stage-three crew member, of working out in the "whirligig," of
living in the "tank" with thirteen other men for weeks without endтАФknowing that the psychologists were
watching. . .