"Stanislaw Lem - Eden" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

slipped from his hands. He swayed for a moment, then regained his balance. No one looked up now; the
men linked arms and pressed the unstable structure from all sides to keep it from separating. The Captain
caught hold of the wheel again. Suddenly there was a scraping sound, and the books tumbled. He hung in
midair -- but the wheel had made a complete turn.
"Eleven more times," he said, dropping onto the pile of books.
Two hours later, the problem of the inner hatch had been solved. When it began to open, the
entire crew cheered.
Suspended halfway up the corridor, the open hatch formed a kind of platform from which the
chamber could be entered without much difficulty. The suits turned out to be undamaged. The lockers
that contained them were now horizontal. The men walked across the locker doors.
"Do we all leave?" asked the Chemist.
"First let's see if we can open the outer hatch. . ."
 But the thing would not budge, as if the levers had fused with the main body. All six pushed
together with their shoulders; then they tried turning the screws in different ways, but the screws would
not turn.
"Arriving is easy -- the hard thing is to disembark," concluded the Doctor.
"Very clever," muttered the Engineer. The sweat was burning his eyes. They sat down on the
locker doors.
"I'm starved," the Cyberneticist said in the general silence.
"We'd better get something to eat," said the Physicist. He offered to go to the storeroom.
"The kitchen would be better. There's food in the freezer. . ."
"I can't do it by myself. There's a ton of junk in the way. Any volunteers?"
The Doctor agreed to go; then the Chemist reluctantly stood up. When their heads disappeared
over the edge of the half-open inner hatch, and the last gleam of the flashlight, which they took with them,
was gone, the Captain said in a hushed voice:
"I didn't want to say anything. You understand the situation?"
"Yes," said the Engineer. In the darkness, he touched the Captain's shoe and kept his hand on it.
He needed the contact.
"You think we can cut through the outer hatch?"
"With what?" asked the Engineer.
"We have a blowtorch."
"Did you ever hear of a blowtorch that could cut through a foot and a half of ceramite?"
They fell silent. From the depths of the ship came a hollow noise, as if from a vault.
"What's that?" asked the Cyberneticist nervously. He got up.
"Sit down," said the Captain gently but firmly.
"Do you think the door. . . fused with the hull?"
"I don't know," the Engineer replied.
"Do you have any idea what happened?"
"We ran into atmosphere at cosmic velocity, where atmosphere should not have been. Yet the
autopilot could not have made an error."
"The autopilot didn't make the error, we did," said the Captain. "We forgot to correct for the
tail."
"What tail?"
"The gas that extends behind every planet with an atmosphere, in the direction opposite to its
motion. You didn't know that?"
"Yes, of course. So we fell into such a tail? But it must be extremely attenuated."
"Ten to the minus six," said the Captain. "Or on that order. But we were traveling at more than
forty-five miles a second, my friend. It stopped us like a wall. That was the first impact, remember?"
"Yes," said the Engineer, "and when we entered the stratosphere, we were still doing six or
seven. We really ought to have smashed to pieces. It's strange that the ship withstood it."