"Zach Hughes - Deep Freeze" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

until you know exactly what buttons to push. As they taught us, you've got
to remember the proper buttonology." So saying, he pushed a button that
caused an explosion of telltale trouble lights on the display.

"I do like to learn from an expert," Fran said smugly.

Dan grinned widely. "Just giving you a demonstration of what not to
do."

He corrected his error and punched in the Navpro. As the old Century
Series computer began to muck around in its Verbolt Cloud memory
chambers it made a sound so much like a labored grunt that Dan pulled
back, startled. Star maps began to flash on and off the display with
dizzying speed.

"Come on now," Dan said, pressing buttons soothingly. The computer's
frantic searchings slowed, but the star fields on the display bore no
resemblance to the dots and blazes of light visible on the optic viewscreen
over Dan's head.

"I told you," Fran said. "I said, Papa, if we're going to go jumping off
into unexplored space on a little ship not much bigger than my dressing
room at home, I think we'd better have a new computer."

"Yes, Mama, that's what you said," Dan sighed, as he spoke comforting
things to the computer through his fingertips.

"Staying close to home wasn't adventurous enough for Mr. Daniel
Webster. No, sir. Taking a nice vacation on Terra II or one of the nice new
wilderness worlds wasn't for him. He had to go where no one else had
gone. He had to spend all sorts of money onтАФwhat?" She paused. Actually,
there was no venom in her comments. They had been together for seventy
years. She had borne him two sons and three daughters, all of them doing
quite well, thank you, and she'd been just as eager as he to have one last
little adventure before settling down into that final quarter of man's
allocated six-score years.

"I spent a considerable sum of money on the Rimfire charts," Dan said
patiently. "But not, as a certain person has hinted, enough to cause us to
spend our last years in privation."

Fran looked upward. "He spent it on charts that show nothing but exit
and entry points into completely unexplored segments of the galaxy," Fran
said to the ship, to the humming little mechanisms, to the purring power
of the blink generator, and to the expanse of unknown stars that glittered
like hard diamonds on the black background of nothingness.

"Ah," Dan said, caressing a button that changed the search mode of the
computer. "Look here, Mama. Somehow or other you hit this white
button. See?"