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

lose, with a sinking sensation as if perched on top of some collapsing tower, he flipped open his
navigation book -- which until now had been stored in his thigh pocket -- and yanked the flight plan from
the envelope. A mental blackout. Where the hell was orbit B68, anyway? That must be it there! He
checked the trajectory and went into a roll. Much to his surprise, it worked.
Once he found himself.on an elliptical path, the computer graciously presented him with the
correctional data; he maneuvered accordingly, overshot his orbit, and braked so suddenly that he
dropped down to -3g for a period of ten seconds, the negative gravity having little effect on him because
of his exceptional physical endurance ("If your brain were half as strong as your biceps," Bullpen once
told him, "you'd have been really something"); guided by the correc-tional data, he pitched into a stable
orbit and fed the computer, but the only output was a series of oscillating standing waves. He yelled out
the figures again, only to discover that he had neglected to switch over; that remedied, the CRT showed
a flickering vertical line and the windows flashed a series of ones. "I'm in orbit!" he piped with glee. But
the computer indicated an orbital period of four hours and twenty-nine minutes, instead of the projected
four hours and twenty-six minutes. Was that a tolerable deviation? he wondered, desperately searching
his memory. He was all set to unbuckle the straps -- the cribsheet was still lying under-neath the seat,
though a damned lot of good it would do him if the answer wasn't there -- when Professor Kaahl's words
suddenly came to mind: "All orbits are programmed with a built-in margin of error of 0.3 percent." But
just to play it safe, he fed the data into the computer, to learn that he was right on the borderline. "Well,
that's that," he sighed, and for the first time he began surveying his surroundings.
Being strapped to his seat, except for a feeling of weight-lessness, he hardly noticed the loss of
gravitation. The forward screen was blanketed with stars, with a brilliant white border skirting the very
bottom. The lateral screens showed nothing but a star-studded black void. But the deck screen -- ah!
Earth was now so immense that it took up the whole screen, and he feasted his eyes on it as he flew over
at an altitude of 700 kilometers at perigee and 2,400 kilometers at apogee. Hey, wasn't that Greenland
down there? But before he could verify that it was, he was already sailing over northern Canada. The
North Pole was capped with iridescent snow, the ocean stood out round and smooth -- violet-black, like
cast iron -- there were strangely few clouds, and what few there were looked like gobs of watery mush
splattered on top of Earth's highest elevation points.
He glanced at the clock. He had been spaceborne for exactly seventeen minutes.
It was time to pick up PAL's radio signal, to start monitoring the radar screens as he passed
through the satellite's contact zone. Now, what were their names again? RO? No -- JO. And let's see,
their numbers were. . . He glanced down at the flight plan, stuck it back into his pocket along with the
navigation book, and turned up the intercom on his chest. At first there was just a lot of screeching and
crackling -- cosmic interference. What system was PAL using? Oh, yeah -- Morse. He listened closely,
his eyes glued to the video screens, and watched as Earth slowly revolved beneath him and stars
scudded by -- but no PAL. Then he heard a buzzing noise.
Could that be it? he wondered, but immediately rejected the idea. You're crazy. Satellites don't
buzz. But what else could it be? Nothing, that's what. Or was it something else? A critical malfunction?
Oddly enough, he was not the least bit alarmed. How could there be a critical malfunction when
he was cruising with his engine off? Maybe the old crate was falling apart, breaking up. Or could it be a
short circuit? Good Lord, a short circuit! Fire Prevention Code, section 3(a): "In Case of Fire in Orbit,"
paragraph. . . Oh, to hell with it! The buzzing was now so loud that it was drowning out the bleeping
sounds of distant signals.
It sounds like. . . a fly trapped in a jar, he thought, somewhat perplexed, and began shifting his
gaze from dial to dial.
Then he spotted it.
It was a giant of a fly, one of those ugly, greenish-black brutes specially designed to make life
miserable -- a pestering, pesky, idiotic, and by the same token shrewd and cunning fly, which had
miraculously -- and how else? -- stowed away in the ship's control cabin and was now zooming about in
the space outside the blister, occasionally ricocheting off the illuminat-ed instrument gauges like a buzzing