"Edmond Hamilton - The Stars, My Brothers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

But Kieran had a certain intellectual honesty, and after a while he admitted to himself that neither the
beauty nor the romance of it was what made this life so attractive to him. It was the fact that he was far
away from Earth. He did not even have to look at Earth, for nearly all geophysical research was taken
care of by Wheels Two and Three that circled the mother planet. He was almost completely divorced
from all Earth's problems and people.

Kieran liked people, but had never felt that he understood them. What seemed important to them, all the
drives of ordinary day-to-day existence, had never seemed very important to him. He had felt that there
must be something wrong with him, something lacking, for it seemed to him that people everywhere
committed the most outlandish follies, believed in the most incredible things, were swayed by pure
herd-instinct into the most harmful courses of behavior. They could not all be wrong, he thought, so he
must be wrongтАФand it had worried him. He had taken partial refuge in pure science, but the study and
then the teaching of astrophysics had not been the refuge that Wheel Five was. He would be sorry to
leave the Wheel when his time was up.

And he was sorry, when the day came. The others of the staff were already out in the docking lock in the
rim, waiting to greet the replacements from the ferry. Kieran, hating to leave, lagged behind. Then,
realizing it would be churlish not to meet this young Frenchman who was replacing him, he hurried along
the corridor in the big spoke when he saw the ferry coming in.

He was two-thirds of the way along the spoke to the rim when it happened. There was a tremendous
crash that flung him violently from his feet. He felt a coldness, instant and terrible.

He was dying. He was dead.

The ferry had been coming in on a perfectly normal approach when the tiny something went wrong, in the
ship or in the judgment of the pilot. Its drive rockets suddenly blasted on full, it heeled over sharply, it
smashed through the big starboard spoke like a knife through butter.

Wheel Five staggered, rocked, and floundered. The automatic safety bulkheads had all closed, and the
big spoke Section T2 was the only section to blow its air, and Kieran was the only man caught in it. The
alarms went off, and while the wreckage of the ferry, with three dead men in it, was still drifting close by,
everyone in the Wheel was in his pressure-suit and emergency measures were in full force.
****
Within thirty minutes it became evident that the Wheel was going to survive this accident. It was edging
slowly out of orbit from the impetus of the blow, and in the present weakened state of the construction its
small corrective rockets could not be used to stop the drift. But Meloni, the UNRC captain commanding,
had got first reports from his damage-control teams, and it did not look too bad. He fired off peremptory
demands for the repair materials he would need, and was assured by UNRC headquarters at Mexico
City that the ferries would be loaded and on their way as soon as possible.

Meloni was just beginning to relax a little when a young officer brought up a minor but vexing problem.
Lieutenant Vinson had headed the small party sent out to recover the bodies of the four dead men. In
their pressure-suits they had been pawing through the tangled wreckage for some time, and young Vinson
was tired when he made his report.

"We have all four alongside, sir. The three men in the ferry were pretty badly mangled in the crash.
Kieran wasn't physically wounded, but died from space-asphyxiation."