"Zach Hughes - Pressure Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

losing he r now, Houston. Shes getting fuzzy because of the atmosphere. She's
not going straight in, but is approaching in an orbital posture. She's fading
now and we're getting nothing but the planet.-
Dom was sitting on the edge of his chair. He felt an atavistic crawling at the
nape of his neck as his hair tried to stand up in -an age-old response to the
unknown. 11is pulse- rate was up and he was breathing fast. "Interesting?"
J.J. asked, with a wry smile. "What's a bogie?" Dom asked, not familiar with
the term but knowing without doubt that it had been used
PRESSURE MAN
is
refer to an unidentified ship of gargantuan prooor-
Olt's antique slang used by some of the exploration
J.J. said. "It goes all the way back to the wars "0 the last century. I looked
it up once. There was a ow named Bogart who played bad men in filmed
as. They called him Bogie. In the air wars an y fi ter was a bad guy, a
bogie."
i
ship out there, how do you know its a bogie, s
YT'
t @Ve don' . Later pn in time the term tame to be apied to, any unidentified
flying object." "Andis this one stiff unidentified?" Dom asked.
Yes. "It, went into the atmosphere of Jupiter?" "Yes. Two months ago Callisto
Explorer was pulled h mission and sent into Jupiter orbit, closer than
er
ve. en before. It was almost too close. They used much fuel getting out of the
gravity well and We to send a rescue ship from Mars. We'll get theta, they're
stiff in space." "The ship came from outside the system," Dom said. 'twithout
a doubt." "And it's lost." "Not necessarily," Barnes said, tenting his hands
und hi chin. "Quit playing games, J.J.," Dom said. "Listen.
J.J. pushed the play button on the machine. Dom heard the great flare of sound
which is the background noise of Jupiter. "We have to listen closely," J.J.
said.
He heard it then, a thin, weak series of pulses, re-
a few secpeated in the same pattern at intervals of onds. It was difficult to
imagine the power of a
the transmitter which could make itself heard through
16 Zach Hughes great.rush of Jupit&'s radio output, the
crushing radiations of a failed sun. "Impossible," Dom said. "She'd go right
on down toward the core' 'into a, pressure of one hun'dred thou- .sand
atmospheres. Nothing could withstand such pressure.12, "We've run this series
of pulses through every corn- ,puter in the world," J.J. said. "We've got the
best men in the world working on it, but there!s not enough. If someone who
didn't speak our language picked up one of our ships sending Mayday he'd be as
helpless as we are to figure out what the ship was saying. But we know the
signal is amazingly powerful. It has to be to be heard over Jupe's noise. That
makes us think she's orbiting just inside the atmosphere. After a careful
study of Callisto Explorer's film it seems that the ship went in at the right
angle and the right speed to establish a stable orbit." "How deep?" Dom asked.
"Remember that diving hull you designed?" "It was good to,forty thousand feet
of ocean," Dom said. "Over a thousand atmospheres of pressure." "Youll have to