"Judith Merril - Stormy Weather" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

lopsided new-moon sun: one arm, on top, much longer than the bottom one, because of the Station's
relative position "under" the plane of the ecliptic.
But even as she watched, the long skinny arm on top grew visibly shorter; less than five hours from
now the Station's orbit would intersect and enter the umbra of Earth's shadow. The "total" eclipse would
last, then, for a full day and a little more. Twenty-six hours, seventeen minutes, thirty-nine seconds, the
calcker said, and the figures stuck in her head like symbols of doom.
No sun up in the sky! Stormy weather!
There would be only a few more hours after that, two periods at most, before the Station raced
inward under Earth's orbit, moving faster and faster into the full light of the sun again. Three days gone,
and less than two to goтАФbut all that time the green index figure on the ceiling would be falling.
At 50 percent, oxy production in the tank was just about equal to basic minimum requirements for
one Cathy-sized individual doing a predetermined job in a known volume of space, with no waste
motion, and no other unnecessary expenditure of air. According to the tape, the index wasn't likely to go
below 57.000 this time тАФif she was careful. And that of course assumed continuous effective operation
by the notoriously unreliable u-v's.
Cathy looked up at the green figure on the ceiling: 88.215.
It was falling faster now. Abruptly, she squashed out the not-quite-finished cigarette. The margin was
just too narrow to fool around with. If the index did fall to fifty, it would mean accelerating the Station,
using storage fuel from the great tank "overhead" to get back into the sunlight more quickly.

AT THE other end of the Station's long elliptical orbit, in the inner circle of the Asteroid Belt, such a
maneuver was inevitably dangerous, and very possibly fatal. Getting even slightly off-course at any time
made the analog predictions useless, and following an uncharted course out in the Belt, you were likely as
not to find yourself disputing the right-of-way with a stubborn chunk of rock.
Cathy sat huddled against the cushioned bulkhead, alone and miserable, weary and wakeful,
frustrated and fearful. The vast expanse outside the viewport seemed to have borrowed her mood for
coloring.
When he went away, the blues came in and met me. . . .
Suddenly, she leaned over to the right, reached for a dial, and spun it fiercely, adjusting the
polarization of the port plastic to compensate for the change in quality and intensity of the sunlight. Three
days drifting into the shadow, and she hadn't thought to do that before! Now the crescent sun flared into
sudden brilliance, and the small room acquired an almost cheerful glare.
She was surprised at the difference it made; the purplish light had seemed normal and inevitable.
Stormy weather . . . three days of it. No Mike. No light.
"Three days, that's all," she said out loud, trying to make it sound like just a little while. She'd gone
twenty-five years, after all, without even knowing him. Now it was just three days since they'd lost
contact. At worst, it was only another week before she'd be back on Earth herself, and could find out.
One week . . . seven days; just seven brief eternities, that's all!
Time is a subjective phenomenon, she told herself. Time is a trick of the mind. "A purely personal
psychological defense against dimensions beyond understanding. . . ." Who was it who said that? It
seemed very profound. An instructor somewhere, maybe. . .
Time is where you hang your hopes. At least nobody had said that; that was Cathy, herself, original.
Time-past is flat and gone, no more than a set of impressions in the cells of a brain. My brain.
Time-future is tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes. It's always today, the time is now, a composite of
memory and hope and longing focused on the pinpoint of perception that is now. . . .
Now is the time for all good Cathys to go to sleep. Got to sleep sometime. Close the hatch. Get in
the bunk. Pull up the magneblanket . . . wonderful . . . good, good, good to be sleepy, relaxed . . .
"Alert for action. Alert for action! ALERT FOR ACTION."
The chrono speaker was louder and more incisive each time.
 Cathy dived across the room to where two red bulbs glowed their warnings over agitated