"Robert A. Heinlein - Farmer In The Sky" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

It had handholds and grab lines all over it. I didn't let go again, but pulled myself along, monkey fashion,
to one of the ports.

And there I got my first view of Earth from space.

I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't what I expected. There it was, looking just like it does in the
geography books, or maybe more the way it does in the station announcements of Super-New-York TV
station. And yet it was different. I guess I would say it was like the difference between being told about a
good hard kick in the rear and actually being kicked.

Not a transcription. Alive.

For one thing it wasn't prettily centered in a television screen; it was shouldering into one side of the
frame of the port, and the aft end of the ship cut a big chunk out of the Pacific Ocean. And it was
moving, shrinking. While I hung there it shrunk to about half the size it was when I first got there and got
rounder and rounder. Columbus was right.

From where I was it was turned sideways; the end of Siberia, then North America, and finally the north
half of South America ran across from left to right. There were clouds over Canada and the eastern part
of the rest of North America; they were the whitest white I ever sawтАФwhiter than the north pole cap.
Right opposite us was the reflection of the Sun on the ocean; it hurt my eyes. The rest of the ocean was
almost purple where there weren't clouds.

It was so beautiful my throat ached and I wanted to reach out and touch it.

And back of it were stars, even brighter and bigger and more of them than the way they look from Little
America.

Pretty soon there were more people crowding around, trying to see, and kids shoving and their mothers
saying, тАЬNow, now, darling!тАЭ and making silly remarks themselves. I gave up. I pulled myself back to my
couch and put one belt around me so I wouldn't float away and thought about it. It makes you proud to
know that you come from a big, fancy planet like that. I got to thinking that I hadn't seen all of it, not by a
long sight, in spite of all the geography trips I had made and going to one Scout round-up in Switzerland
and the time George and Anne and I went to Siam.

And now I wasn't going to see any more of it. It made me feel pretty solemn.

I looked up; there was a boy standing in front of me. He said, тАЬWhat's the trouble, William, my boy?
Dropsick?тАЭ

It was that twerp Jones. You could have knocked me out with a feather. If I had known he was going to
emigrate, I would have thought twice about it.

I asked him where in the world he had come from.

тАЬThe same place you did, naturally. I asked you a question.тАЭ

I informed him that I was not dropsick and asked him whatever gave him that silly notion. He reached
out and grabbed my arm and turned it so that the red spot the injection had made showed. He laughed
and I jerked my arm away.