"Joe Haldeman - The Forever War (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

"superfluid," so what evaporation there was had to take place evenly, all over the surface. No hot
spots, so no bubbling.
We weren't supposed to use lights, to "avoid detection." There was plenty of starlight with your
image converter cranked up to log three or four, but each stage of amplification meant some loss
of detail. By log four the landscape looked like a crude monochrome painting, and you couldn't
read the names on people's helmets unless they were right in front of you.
The landscape wasn't all that interesting, anyhow. There were half a dozen medium-sized meteor
craters (all with exactly the same level of helium II in them) and the suggestion of some puny
mountains just over the horizon. The
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uneven ground was the consistency of frozen spiderwebs; every time you put your foot down, you'd
sink half an inch with a squeaking crunch. It could get on your nerves.
It took most of a day to pull all the stuff out of the pool. We took shifts napping, which you
could do either standing ap, sitting or lying on your stomach. I didn't do well in ~ny of those
positions, so I was anxious to get the bunker built and pressurized.
We couldn't build the thing underground---it'd just fill up with helium 11-so the first thing to
do was to build an tnsulating platform, a permaplast-vacuum sandwich three layers thick.
I was an acting corporal, with a crew of ten people. We were carrying the permaplast layers to the
building site- two people can carry one easily-when one of "my" men slipped and fell on his back.
"Damn it, Singer, watch your step." We'd had a couple of deaders that way.
"Sony, Corporal. I'm bushed. Just got my feet tangled up.,'
"Yeah, just watch it." He got back up all right, and he and his partner placed the sheet and went
back to get another.
I kept my eye on Singer. In a few minutes he was practically staggering, not easy to do in that
suit of cybernetic armor.
"Singer! After you set the plank, I want to see you."
"OK." He labored through the task and mooched over. "Let me check your readout." I opened the door
on his chest to expose the medical monitor. His temperature was two degrees high; blood pressure
and heart rate both elevated. Not up to the red line, though.
"You sick or something?"
"Hell, Mandella, I feel OK, just tired. Since I fell I been a little dizzy."
I chinned the medic's combination. "Doc, this is Man-della. You wanna come over here for a
minute?"
"Sure, where are you?" I waved and he walked over from poolside.
"What's the problem?" I showed him Singer's readout.
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He knew what all the other little dials and things meant, so it took him a while. "As far as I can
tell, Mandella... he's just hot."
"Hell, I coulda told you that," said Singer.
"Maybe you better have the armorer take a look at his suit." We had two people who'd taken a crash
course in suit maintenance; they were our "armorers."
I chinned Sanchez and asked him to come over with his tool kit.
"Be a couple of minutes, Corporal. Carryin' a plank."
"Well, put it down and get on over here." I was getting an uneasy feeling. Waiting for him, the
medic and I looked over Singer's suit.
"Uh-oh," Doc Jones said. "Look at this." I went around to the back and looked where he was
pointing. Two of the fins on the heat exchanger were bent out of shape.
"What's wrong?" Singer asked.