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

Yes, they did, too. That's why you were supposed to report it when anything like this happened. She
hadn't reported. She'd wanted to finish her term of Service. They never actually fired you, of course. But
somehow the girls who fell in love always decided to quitтАФafter a few visits with the psychers.
Maybe they were right, if she'd got to the point now where she couldn't tell the difference between a
dream of her own and a message from Mike!
She ought to try just once more. . . .
81.506.
And outside, only the slimmest rim of light around the Earth.
You don't take chances on a Station!
It's not your own life you're playing with, Cathy. The Solar System has its eye on you.
No, it doesn't, either. Just a tiny corner of one eye, a veritable lewd wink of an eye. The sun can't see
me now; it's got a cataract.
But the System depends on you, kid. How will all those lil chunks of rock know where to go if you
don't show 'em the way?
"Traffic Control is the most vital agency in the Space Service. We are no stronger than the
weakest link in. . . ."
Keep the vermin out of the skies. Catherine Andauer, girl exterminator. Somebody has to tell all
the nasty little rogue rocks where to get off.
If things keep up this way, ole rockin' chair will get me...
If things kept up this way, she'd have to report in for psych leave, that's all.
If she could, that is . . . if she could still send a message at all. . . .
Meanwhile, there was a job to do, and no one to do it but her.
81.487, and the chrono said 1735 hours. Seventy minutes to go. Too late to sleep now.
Exercise.
That was the next best thing. Or maybe the best. Use up more oxygen, of course, but she could
afford a little bit. And right now it was more important to stay alert. Stimulation could do more than
relaxation sometimes.
She strapped herself into the massager and felt better almost immediately as rubber arms began to
manipulate her stiff muscles and blood started pounding faster through her veins. She gave it ten
minutesтАФless than she wanted, but a compromise with the green index figure. Then, in lieu of the meal
she still didn't really want, she opened a bar of vi-choc concentrate and ate it slowly and determinedly,
piece by piece, till it was all gone. Saved oxygen, too, she told herself, not heating a freeze-meal.

THE ceiling panel said 80.879 when the chrono read 1835, and the speaker said importantly:
"Final check before action. Commence last logging now. Initiate action in fifteen minutes. Last logging
now. Final instrument check. Commence last. . . ."
She worked swiftly, surely, enjoying the feeling of urgency, as well as her own sense of competence.
Meters and dials and familiar precision mechanismsтАФall things your eyes could perceive and your fingers
could direct. Not like the strange uncharted stretches in the dark interior of self.
Check the logging against the analog. Run the last equations through the calcker one more time.
Everything should check. Everything would be exactly... .
But it wasn't.
The cloud was not behaving in an orderly fashion. It was diffusing, as she'd known it might . . .
toward Earth.
A three-body problem, in a sense: the third body composed of millions of specks and bits and
pieces, and behaving in gravitational terms exactly as if it were a composite massтАФof fluid!
She had set up general equations to meet the possibility beforehand, but now she had to work
quickly, filling in new data and getting corrected results. She finished the comping and was still rechecking
when the chrono speaker pinged again to remind her:
"Space suit. Space suit. Prepare for open locks. Space suit. Space suit."