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

"Oscar, you're all right," I told it. "You and I are partners. We're going
places." I would have sneered at five thousand dollars for Oscar.
While Oscar was taking his pressure tests I worked on his electrical and
electronic gear. I didn't bother with a radar target or beacon; the first is
childishly simple, the second is fiendishly expensive. But I did want radio
for the space-operations band of the spectrum -- the antennas suited only
those wavelengths. I could have built an ordinary walkie-talkie and hung it
outside -- but I would have been kidding myself with a wrong frequency and
gear that might not stand vacuum. Changes in pressure and temperature and
humidity do funny things to electronic circuits; that is why the radio was
housed inside the helmet.
The manual gave circuit diagrams, so I got busy. The audio and
modulating circuits were no problem, just battery-operated transistor
circuitry which I could make plenty small enough. But the microwave part -- It
was a two-headed calf, each with transmitter and receiver -- one centimeter
wavelength for the horn and three octaves lower at eight centimeters for the
spike in a harmonic relationship, one crystal controlling both. This gave more
signal on broadcast and better aiming when squirting out the horn and also
meant that only part of the rig had to be switched in changing antennas. The
output of a variable-frequency oscillator was added to the crystal frequency
in tuning the receiver. The circuitry was simple -- on paper.
But microwave circuitry is never easy; it takes precision machining and
a slip of a tool can foul up the impedance and ruin a mathematically
calculated resonance.
Well, I tried. Synthetic precision crystals are cheap from surplus
houses and some transistors and other components I could vandalize from my own
gear. And I made it work, after the fussiest pray-and-try-again I have ever
done. But the consarned thing simply would not fit into the helmet.
Call it a moral victory -- I've never done better work.
I finally bought one, precision made and embedded in plastic, from the
same firm that sold me the crystal. Like the suit it was made for, it was
obsolete and I paid a price so low that I merely screamed. By then I would
have mortgaged my soul -- I wanted that suit to work.
The only thing that complicated the rest of the electrical gear was that
everything had to be either "fail-safe" or "no-fail"; a man in a space suit
can't pull into the next garage if something goes wrong -- the stuff has to
keep on working or he becomes a vital statistic. That was why the helmet had
twin headlights; the second cut in if the first failed -- even the peanut
lights for the dials over my head were twins. I didn't take short cuts; every
duplicate circuit I kept duplicate and tested to make sure that automatic
changeover always worked.
Mr. Charton insisted on filling the manual's list on those items a
drugstore stocks -- maltose and dextrose and amino tablets, vitamins,
dexedrine, dramamine, aspirin, antibiotics, antihistamines, codeine, almost
any pill a man can take to help him past a hump that might kill him. He got
Doc Kennedy to write prescriptions so that I could stock Oscar without
breaking laws.
When I got through Oscar was in as good shape as he had ever been in
Satellite Two. It had been more fun than the time I helped Jake Bixby turn his
heap into a hotrod.