"Becalmed In Hell by Larry Niven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Awards)

takes up a twelfth as much room. But his other prosthetic aids
take up most of the ship. The ramjets were hooked into the last
pair of nerve trunks, the nerves which once moved his legs, and
dozens of finer nerves in those trunks sensed and regulated fuel
feed, ram temperature, differential acceleration, intake aper-
ture dilation, and spark pulse.
These connections were intact. I checked them four diferent
ways without finding the slightest reason why they shouldn't be
working.
"Test the others," said Eric.
It took a good two hours to check every trunk nerve con-
nection. They were all solid. The blood pump was chugging
along, and the fluid was rich enough, which killed the idea that
the ram nerves might have "gone to sleep" from lack of
nutrients or oxygen. Since the lab is one of his prosthetic aids, I
let Eric analyse his own blood sugar, hoping that the "liver"
had goofed and was producing some other form of sugar. The
conclusions were appalling. There was nothing wrong with
Ericinside the cabin.
"Eric, you're healthier than I am."
"I could tell. You looked worried, son, and I don*t blame you.
Now you'll have to go outside."
"I know. Let's dig out the suit."
It was in the emergency tools locker, the Venus suit that was
never supposed to be used. NASA had designed it for use at
Venusian ground level. Then they had refused to okay the ship
below twenty miles until they knew more about the planet. The
suit was a segmented armor job. I had watched it being tested
in the heat-and-pressure box at Cal Tech, and I knew that the
joints stopped moving after five hours, and wouldn't start again
until they had been cooled. Now I opened the locker and pulled
the suit out by the shoulders and held it in front of me. It
seemed to be staring back.
"You still can't feel anything in the ramjets?"
"Not a twinge."
I started to put on the suit, piece by piece like medieval
armor. Then I thought of something else. "We're twenty miles
up. Are you going to ask me to do a balancing act on the hull?"
"No! Wouldn't think of it. We'll just have to go down."
The lift from the blimp tank was supposed to be constant
until takeoff. When the time came Eric could get extra lift by
heating the hydrogen to 'higher pressure, then cracking a valve
to let the excess out. Of course he'd have to be very careful that
the pressure was higher in the tank, or we'd get Venusian air
coming in, and the ship would fall instead of rising. Naturally
that would be disastrous.
So Eric lowered the tank temperature and cracked the valve,
and down we went.
"Of course there's a catch," said Eric.
"I know."