"Frank Herbert - Escape Felicity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

Beirut sat bolt upright with surprise.



Thirty-eight plus! A variation percentage in that range could only mean the mother star had another
companion - and a big one. He searched space around the star.

Nothing.

Then he saw it.

At first he thought he'd spotted the drive flare of another ship -an alien. He swallowed, the push
momentarily subdued, and did a quick mental review of the alien-space contact routine worked out by
Earth's bigdomes and which, so far as anyone knew, had never been put to the test.

The flare grew until it resolved itself into the gaseous glow of another astronomical body circling the
golden sun.

Again, Beirut bent to his instruments. My God, how the thing moved! More than forty kilometers per
second. Tape began spewing from the feedout: Mass 321.64 ... rotation nine standard hours ... mean
orbital distance 58 million kilometers ... perturbation blank (insufficient data) ...

Beirut shifted to the filtered visual scanners, watched the companion sweep across the face of its star
and curve out of sight around the other side. The thing looked oddly familiar, but he knew he could never
have seen it before. He wondered if he should activate the computer's vocoder system and talk to it
through the speaker embedded in his neck, but the computer annoyed him with its obscene logic.

The astronomical data went into the banks, though, for the experts to whistle and marvel over later.

Beirut shifted his scanners back to the planet. Shadowline measurement gave it an atmosphere that
reached fade-off at an altitude of about a hundred and twenty-five kilometers. The radiation index
indicated a whopping tropical belt, almost sixty degrees.

With a shock of awareness, Beirut found his hands groping toward the flip-flop controls. He jerked
back, trembling. If he once turned the ship over, he knew he wouldn't have the strength of purpose to
bring her back around. The push had reached terrifying intensity.

Beirut forced his attention onto the landing problem, began feeding data into the computer for the
shortest possible space-to-ground course. The computer offered a few objections 'for his own good,' but
he insisted. Presently, a landing tape appeared and he fed it into the control console, strapped down,
kicked the ship onto automatic and sat back perspiring. His hands held a death grip on the sides of his
crash-pad.

The B-ship began to buck with the first skipping-flat entrance into the planet's atmosphere. The bucking
stopped, returned, stopped - was repeated many times. The B-ship's cooling system whined. Hull plates
creaked. Darkside, lightside, darkside - they repeated themselves in his viewer. The automatic equipment
began reeling out atmospheric data: oxygen 23.9, nitrogen 74.8, argon 0.8, carbon dioxide 0.04 ... By
the time it got into the trace elements, Beirut was gasping with the similarity to the atmosphere of Mother
Earth.