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

animals, he distributed himself across the entire surface of the Earth, from the frozen Antarctic continent
to the Arctic icecap.

Man became an equatorial animal, a temperate zone animal, an arctic animal. He became a plains
dweller, a valley dweller, a mountain dweller. The swamp and the desert became equally his home.
Man made his own environment.

With his inventive mind and his dexterous hands, he fashioned it, conquered cold and heat, dampness,
aridness, land, sea, air. Now, with his science, he had conquered everything. He had become
independent of the world that bore him.

It was a birthday cake for all mankind, celebrating its coming of age.

Brutally, the disaster was icing on the cake.

But it was more, too. When everything is considered, perhaps it was the aspect that, for a few, brief
days, united humanity and made possible what we did.

It was a sign: Man is never completely independent of Earth; he carries with him his environment; he is
always and forever a part of humanity. It was a conquest mellowed by a confession of mortality and
error.

It was a statement: Man has within him the qualities of greatness that will never accept the restraints of
circumstance, and yet he carries, too, the seeds of fallibility that we all recognize in ourselves.

Rev was one of us. His triumph was our triumph; his perilтАФmore fully and finelyтАФwas our peril.

Reverdy L. McMillen, III, first lieutenant, U.S.A.F. Pilot. Rocket jockey. Man. Rev. He was only a
thousand miles away, calling for help, but those miles were straight up. We got to know him as well as
any member of our own family.

The news came as a great personal shock to me. I knew Rev. We had become good friends in college,
and fortune had thrown us together in the Air Force, a writer and a pilot. I had got out as soon as
possible, but Rev had stayed in. I knew, vaguely, that he had been testing rocket-powered airplanes with
Chuck Yeager. But I had no idea that the rocket program was that close to space.

Nobody did. It was a better-kept secret than the Manhattan Project.

I remember staring at Rev's picture in the evening newspaperтАФthe straight black hair, the thin, rakish
mustache, the Clark Gable ears, the reckless, rueful grinтАФand I felt again, like a physical thing, his great
joy in living. It expressed itself in a hundred ways. He loved widely, but with discrimination. He ate well,
drank heartily, reveled in expert jazz and artistic inventiveness, and talked incessantly.

Now he was alone and soon all that might be extinguished. I told myself that I would help.

That was a time of wild enthusiasm. Men mobbed the Air Force Proving Grounds at Cocoa, Florida,
wildly volunteering their services. But I was no engineer. I wasn't even a welder or a riveter. At best, I
was only a poor word mechanic.

But words, at least, I could contribute.