"Stanislaw Lem - Tales of Pirx the Pilot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

same texture and resilience as extremely hard rubber. The pilot's encapsulated contour couch was
situated in the very center of the control room proper. Thanks to the cabin's cone-shaped design, the
pilot, by sitting in his "dentist's chair" -- as it was called in spaceman's parlance -- and rotating on its
vertical axis, was able to monitor the entire instrument panel through the walls of the blister, with all its
dials, meters, video screens (located fore, aft, and at the side), computer displays, astrograph, as well as
that holy of holies, the trajectometer. This was an instrument whose luminous band was capable of
tracking a vehicle's flight path on a low-luster convex screen, relative to the fixed stars in the Harelsberg
projection. A pilot was expected to know all the components of this projection by heart, and to be able
to take a readout from virtually any position -- even upside down. Once seated in a semisupine position,
the pilot had, to the right and left of him, two reactor and attitude control levers, three emergency
controls, six manual stick controls, the ignition and idling switches, along with the power, thrust, and
purge controls. Standing just above the floor was a sprawling, spoke-wheeled hub that housed the
air-conditioning system, oxygen supply, fire-protection bay, catapult (in the event of an uncontrollable
chain reaction), and a cord with a loop attached to a bay containing Thermoses and food. Located just
under the pilot's feet were the braking pedals, softly padded and attached with loop straps, and the abort
handle, which when activated (this was done by kicking in the glass shield and shoving it forward with the
foot) jettisoned the encapsulated seat and pilot, together with a drogue chute of the ringsail variety.
Aside from having as its main function the bailing out of a pilot in an abort situation, the blister
was designed with eight other reasons in mind, and under more favorable circum-stances Pirx might have
been able to enumerate them, though neither he nor his classmates found any of them that persuasive.
Once in the proper reclining position, he had trouble bending over at the waist to attach all the
loose cables, hoses, and wires -- the ones dangling from his suit -- to the terminals sticking out of the
seat. Every time he leaned forward, his suit would bunch up in the middle, pinching him, so that it was no
wonder he confused the radio cable and the heating cable. Luckily, each was threaded differently, but he
had to break out in a terrific sweat before discovering his mistake. As the compressed air instantly
inflated his suit with a pshhh, he leaned back with a sigh and went to fasten his thigh and shoulder straps,
using both hands.
The right strap snapped into place, but the left one was more defiant. Because of the
balloon-sized neck collar, he had trouble turning around, so he had to fumble around blindly for the large
snap hook. Just then he heard muffled voices coming over his earphones:
"Pilot Boerst aboard AMU-18! Lift-off on automatic count-down of zero. Attention, are you
ready?"
"Pilot Boerst aboard AMU-18 and ready for lift-off on automatic countdown of zero!" the cadet
fired back.
Damn that hook, anyhow! At last it clicked into place, and Pirx sank back into the soft contour
couch, as bushed as if he'd just returned from a deep-space probe.
"Minus twenty-three, twenty-two, twen. . ." The count rambled on in his earphones with a steady
patter.
It happened once that at the count of zero two cadets were launched simultaneously -- the one
scheduled to go first, and the one next in line. Both rockets shot up like a couple of Roman candles, less
than 200 meters apart, escaping a midair collision by a mere fraction of an arc second. Or so the story
went. Ever since then -- again, if the rumors were to be believed -- the ignition cable was activated at the
very last moment, by a radio command signal issued by the launch-site commander stationed inside his
glass-paneled booth -- which, if true, would have made a mockery of the whole countdown.
"Zero!" a voice blared in his earphones. All at once Pirx heard a muffled but prolonged rumble,
his contour couch shook, and flickers of light snaked across the glass canopy, under which he lay staring
up at the ceiling panel, taking readings: astrograph, air-cooling gauges, main-stage thrusters, sustaining
and vernier jets, neutron flux density, isotopic contamination gauge, not to speak of the eighteen other
instruments designed almost exclusively to monitor the booster's performance. The vibrations then began
to slacken, the sheet of racket tapered off overhead, and the thunderous roar grew fainter, more like a