"The Hoofer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Miller Walter M)

Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry sand and cursed beнtween his teeth, while his eyes wandered over the sky. They came to rest on the sliver of light-the space station-rising in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless where the gang was-Nichols and Guerrera and Lavrenti and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced him.
Keesey would have a rough time for a while-rough as a cob. The pit was no playground. The first time you went out of the station in a suit, the pit got you. Everything was falling, and you fell with it. Everything. The skeletons of steel, the tire-shaped station, the spheres and docks and nightmare shapes-all tied together by umbilical cables and flexible tubes. Like some crazy sea-thing they seemed, floating in a black ocean with its tentacles bound together by drifting strands in the dark tide that bore it.

Everything was pain-bright or dead black, and it wheeled around you, and you went nuts trying to figure which way was down. In fact, it took you months to teach your body that all ways were down and that the pit was bottomless.
He became conscious of a plaintive sound in the wind, and froze to listen.
It was a baby crying.
It was nearly a minute before he got the significance of it. It hit him where he lived, and he began jerking frantiнcally at his encased feet and sobbing low in his throat. They'd hear him if he kept that up. He stopped and covнered his ears to close out the cry of his firstborn. A light went on in the house, and when it went off again, the inнfant's cry had ceased.
Another rocket went up from the station, and he cursed it. Space was a disease, and he had it.
"Help!" he cried out suddenly. "I'm stuck! Help me, help me!"
He knew he was yelling hysterically at the sky and fightнing the relentless concrete that clutched his feet, and after a moment he stopped.
The light was on in the house again, and he heard faint sounds. The stirring-about woke the baby again, and once more the infant's wail came on the breeze.
Make the kid shut up, make the kid shut up ...
But that was no good. It wasn't the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's fault. No fathers allowed in space, they said, but it wasn't their fault either. They were right, and he had only himself to blame. The kid was an accident, but that didn't change anything. Not a thing in the world. It reнmained a tragedy.
A tumbler had no business with a family, but what was a man going to do? Take a skinning knife, boy, and make yourself a eunuch. But that was no good either. They needed bulls out there in the pit, not steers. And when a man came down from a year's hitch, what was he going to do? Live in a lonely shack and read books for kicks? Because you were a man, you sought out a woman. And because she was a woman, she got a kid, and that was the end of it. It was nobody's fault, nobody's at all.
He stared at the red eye of Mars low in the southwest. They were running out there now, and next year he would have been on the long long run ...
But there was no use thinking about it. Next year and the years after belonged to little Hogey.
He sat there with his feet locked in the solid concrete of the footing, staring out into Big Bottomless while his son's cry came from the house and the Hauptman men-folk came wading through the tall grass in search of someone who had cried out. His feet were stuck tight, and he wouldn't ever get them out. He was sobbing softly when they found him.