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

Do you know the worst thing about spaceships? They smell bad.

Even theMayflower smelled bad and she was brand new. She smelled of oil and welding and solvents
and dirty, sweaty smells of all the workmen who had lived in her so long. Then we came, three shiploads
of us, most of us pretty whiff with that bad odor people get when they're scared or very nervous. My
stomach still wasn't happy and it almost got me.

The worst of it is that there can't be very good 'freshers in a ship; a bath is a luxury. After the ship got
organized we were issued tickets for two baths a week, but how far does that go, especially when a bath
means two gallons of water to sponge yourself off with?
 If you felt you justhad to have a bath, you could ask around and maybe buy a ticket from somebody
who was willing to skip one. There was one boy in my bunk room who sold his tickets for four weeks
running until we all got sick of it and gave him an unscheduled bath with a very stiff brush. But I'm getting
ahead of myself.

And you couldn't burn your clothes either; you had towash them.

When we first got into theMayflower it took them maybe half an hour to get us all sorted out and into
our acceleration couches. The people from theDaedalus and theIcarus were supposed to be stowed
away by the time we got there, but they weren't and the passageways were traffic jams. A traffic jam
when everybody is floating, and you don't know which end is up, is about eight times as confusing as an
ordinary one.

There weren't any stewardesses to get us straight, either; there were emigrants instead, with signs on
their chests reading SHIP'S AIDEтАУbut a lot of them needed aid themselves; they were just as lost as
anybody else. It was like amateur theatricals where the ushers don't know how to find the reserved seats.

By the time I was in the bunk room I was assigned to and strapped down there were bells ringing all
over the place and loudspeakers shouting: тАЬPrepare for acceleration! Ten minutes!тАЭ

Then we waited.

It seemed more like half an hour. Presently the count-off started. I said to myself, William, if the blast-off
from Earth was rugged, this is going to knock the teeth right out of your head. I knew what we were
going to build up toтАФbetter than ninety-three miles per second. That's a third of a million miles an hour!
Frankly I was scared.

The seconds ticked away; there was a soft push that forced me down against the cushionsтАФand that
was all. I just lay there; the ceiling was the ceiling again and the floor was under me, but I didn't feel extra
heavy, I felt fine.

I decided that was just the first step; the next one would be a dilly.

Up overhead in the bunk room was a display screen; it lighted up and I was looking into the face of a
man with four collar stripes; he was younger than Captain DeLongPre. He smiled and said, тАЬThis is your
Captain speaking, friendsтАФCaptain Harkness. The ship will remain at one gravity for a little more than
four hours.I think it is time to serve lunch, don't you?тАЭ

He grinned again and I realized that my stomach wasn't bothering me at allтАФexcept that I was terribly