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

distant thunderstorm, before giving way to a dead silence.
Then -- a hissing and a humming, but so sudden he had hardly any time to panic. The automatic
sequencer had activated the previously dormant screens, which were always disconnected by remote
control to protect the camera lenses from being damaged by the blinding atomic blast of a nearby launch.
These automatic controls are pretty nifty, thought Pirx. He was still miles away in his thoughts
when his hair suddenly stood on end underneath his dome-shaped helmet.
My Gawd, I'm next, now it's my turn! suddenly flashed through his mind.
Instantaneously, he started getting the lift-off controls into ready position, manipulating each of
them with his fingers in the proper sequence and counting to himself: "One, two three. . . Now where's
the fourth? There it is. . . okay. . . now for the gauge. . . then the pedal. . . No, not the pedal -- the
handgrip. . . First the red one and then the green one. . . Now for the automatic sequencer. . . right. . . Or
was it the other way around -- first green, then red. . .?!"
"Pilot Pirx aboard AMU-27!" The voice booming into his ear roused him from his predicament.
"Lift-off on automatic countdown of zero! Attention, are you ready, pilot?"
"Not yet!" he felt like yelling, but said instead:
"Pilot Boer. . . Pilot Pirx aboard AMU-27 and ready for -- uh -- lift-off on automatic countdown
of zero."
He had been on the verge of saying "Pilot Boerst" because he still had Boerst's words fresh in his
memory. "You nut," he said to himself in the ensuing silence. Then the automatic countdown -- why did
these recorded voices always have to sound like an NCO? -- barked:
"Minus sixteen, fifteen, fourteen. . ."
Pirx broke out in a cold sweat. There was something he was forgetting, something terribly
important, a matter of life and death.
". . .six, five, four. . ."
His sweaty fingers squeezed the handgrip. Luckily it had a rough finish. Does everyone work up
such a sweat? he wondered. Probably -- it crossed his mind just before the earphones snarled:
"Zero!!!"
His left hand -- instinctively -- pulled back on the lever until it reached the halfway mark. There
was a terrific blast, and his chest and skull were flattened by some resilient, rubber-like press. The
booster! was his last thought before his eyesight began to dim. But only a little, and then not for long.
Gradually his vision improved, though the unrelenting pressure had spread to the rest of his body. Before
long he could make out all the video screens -- at least the three opposite him -- now inundated with a
torrent of milk gushing from a million overturned cans.
I must be breaking through the clouds, he thought. His mind, though somewhat slower on the
uptake, was totally relaxed. As time went by, he felt increasingly like a spectator to some strange
comedy. There he was, lying fiat on his back in his "dentist's chair," arms and legs paralyzed, not a cloud
in sight, surrounded by a phony pastel-blue sky. . . Hey, were those stars over there, or what?
Stars they were. Meanwhile the gauges were working steadily away -- on the ceiling, on the
walls -- each in its own way, each with a different function to perform. And he was supposed to monitor
each and every one of them -- and with two eyes, no less! At the sound of a bleeping signal in his
earphones, his left hand -- again by instinct -- fired the booster separation, immediately lowering the
pressure. He was cruising at a velocity of 7.1 kilometers per second, he was at an altitude of 201
kilometers, and his acceleration was 1.9 as he pitched out of his assigned launch path. Now he could
afford to relax a while, but not for long, because pretty soon he would have his hands full -- and how!
He was just starting to make himself comfortable, pressing the armrest to raise the seat in back,
when he suddenly went numb all over.
"The crib! Where's the cribsheet!"
This was that awfully important detail he couldn't remem-ber at the time. He scoured the deck
with his eyes, now totally oblivious of the swarm of pulsating gauges. The cribsheet had slipped down
under the contour couch. He tried to bend over, was held back by his torso straps; without a moment to