"Robert A. Heinlein - Have Space Suit Will Travel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

Here is how you beat those dangers. Carry steel bottles on your back;
they hold "air" (oxygen and helium) at a hundred and fifty atmospheres, over
2000 pounds per square inch; you draw from them through a reduction valve down
to 150 p.s.i. and through still another reduction valve, a "demand" type which
keeps pressure in your helmet at three to five pounds per square inch -- two
pounds of it oxygen. Put a silicone-rubber collar around your neck and put
tiny holes in it, so that the pressure in the body of your suit is less, the
air movement still faster; then evaporation and cooling will be increased
while the effort of bending is decreased. Add exhaust valves, one at each
wrist and ankle -- these have to pass water as well as gas because you may be
ankle deep in sweat.
The bottles are big and clumsy, weighing around sixty pounds apiece, and
each holds only about five mass pounds of air even at that enormous pressure;
instead of a month's supply you will have only a few hours -- my suit was
rated at eight hours for the bottles it used to have. But you will be okay for
those hours -- if everything works right. You can stretch time, for you don't
die from overheating very fast and can stand too much carbon dioxide even
longer -- but let your oxygen run out and you die in about seven minutes.
Which gets us back where we started -- it takes oxygen to stay alive.
To make darn sure that you're getting enough (your nose can't tell) you
clip a little photoelectric cell to your ear and let it see the color of your
blood; the redness of the blood measures the oxygen it carries. Hook this to a
galvanometer. If its needle gets into the danger zone, start saying your
prayers.
I went to Springfield on my day off, taking the suit's hose fittings,
and shopped. I picked up, second hand, two thirty-inch steel bottles from a
welding shop -- and got myself disliked by insisting on a pressure test. I
took them home on the bus, stopped at Pring's Garage and arranged to buy air
at fifty atmospheres. Higher pressures, or oxygen or helium, I could get from
the Springfield airport, but I didn't need them yet.
When I got home I closed the suit, empty, and pumped it with a bicycle
pump to two atmospheres absolute, or one relative, which gave me a test load
of almost four to one compared with space conditions. Then I tackled the
bottles. They needed to be mirror bright, since you can't afford to let them
pick up heat from the Sun. I stripped and scraped and wire-brushed, and buffed
and polished, preparatory to nickel-plating.
Next morning, Oscar the Mechanical Man was limp as a pair of long johns.
Getting that old suit not just airtight but helium-tight was the worst
headache. Air isn't bad but the helium molecule is so small and agile that it
migrates right through ordinary rubber -- and I wanted this job to be right,
not just good enough to perform at home but okay for space. The gaskets were
shot and there were slow leaks almost impossible to find.
I had to get new silicone-rubber gaskets and patching compound and
tissue from Goodyear; small-town hardware stores don't handle such things. I
wrote a letter explaining what I wanted and why -- and they didn't even charge
me. They sent me some mimeographed sheets elaborating on the manual.
It still wasn't easy. But there came a day when I pumped Oscar full of
pure helium at two atmospheres absolute.
A week later he was still tight as a six-ply tire.
That day I wore Oscar as a self-contained environment. I had already