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

deep flat black:
"Night or space."
"Very good, Sergeant To my knowledge, this is the only feature of the suit that was perfected
after your trainin& The control is around your left wrist and is admittedly awkward. But once you
find the right combination, it's easy to lock in.
"Now, you didn't get much in-suit training Earthside. We didn't want you to get used to using the
thing in a friendly environment. The fighting suit is the deadliest personal weapon ever built,
and with no weapon is it easier
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ThE FUHLVI~~1t WAIt
I'
for the user to kill himself through carelessness. Turn around, Sergeant.
"Case in point." He tapped a large square protuberance between the shoulders. "Exhaust fins. As
you know, the suit tries to keep you at a comfortable temperature no matter what the weather's
like outside. The material of the suit is as near to a perfect insulator as we could get,
consistent with mechanical demands. Therefore, these fins get hot- especially hot, compared to
darkside temperatures-as they bleed off the body's heat.
"All you have to do is lean up against a boulder of
frozen gas; there's lots of it around. The gas will sublime off faster than it can escape from the
fins; in escaping, it will push against the surrounding 'ice' and fracture it... and in about one-
hundredth of a second, you have the equivalent of a hand grenade going off right below your neck.
You'll never feel a thing.
"Variations on this theme have killed eleven people in the past two months. And they were just
building a bunch of huts.
"I assume you know how easily the waldo capabilities can kill you or your companions. Anybody want
to shake hands with the sergeant?" He paused, then stepped over and clasped his glove. "He's had
lots of practice. Until you have, be extremely careful. You might scratch an itch and wind up
breaking your back. Remember, semi-logarithmic response: two pounds' pressure exerts five pounds'
force; three pounds' gives ten; four pounds', twenty-three; five pounds', forty-seven. Most of you
can muster up a grip of well over a hundred pounds. Theoretically, you could rip a steel girder in
two with that, amplified. Actually, you'd destroy the material of your gloves and, at least on
Charon, die very quickly. It'd be a race between decompression and flash-freezing. You'd die no
matter which won.
"The leg waldos are also dangerous, even though the amplification is less extreme. Until you're
really skilled, don't try to run, or jump. You're likely to trip, and that means you're likely to
die."
"Charon' s gravity is three-fourths of Earth normal, so it's not too bad. But on a really small
world, like Luna,
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Joe Haldeman
you could take a running jump and not come down for twenty minutes, just keep sailing over the
horizon. Maybe bash into a mountain at eighty meters per second. On a small asteroid, it'd be no
trick at all to run up to escape velocity and be off on an informal tour of intergalactic space.
It's a slow way to travel.
"Tomorrow morning, we'll start teaching you how to stay alive inside this infernal machine. The
rest of the afternoon and evening, I'll call you one at a time to be fitted. That's all,
Sergeant."
Cortez went to the door and turned the stopcock that let air into the airlock. A bank of infrared
lamps went on to keep air from freezing inside it. When the pressures were equalized, he shut the
stopcock, unclainped the door and stepped in, clamping it shut behind him. A pump hummed for about