"Who Needs Insurance by Robin Scott" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Award Stories 2)

inboard engines.
Funny how suddenly aware you can be at a time like that.
My whole life did not pass before my eyes; I was much too
busy watching the curious, almost slow-motion effect of eight
pounds of high-explosive and fine German steel. There was
light, of course, like a hundred flashbulbs going off at once,
and there was heat and blast. George simply disappeared. So
did his yoke and several feet of fuselage. The nose canopy
was gone and the sudden drag and the blast threw me forward
against my yoke. I grabbed it, surprised that I could still grab,
and looked to see if I had any feet left. All I could see was
gore, but it wasn't mine. It was the bombardier's. He was a
young kid, a year younger than my ancient twenty, and I
can't even remember his name.
My being thrown against the yoke nosed us down enough
so that we didn't stall out then and there, and I was able to
get us a little flying speed before we ran out of air and joined
the Rumanian underground. I went to full power on Number
One and Number Four and we got on out of there. Major
Bricks, the Squadron Intelligence Officer, was riding observer
and doubling at one of the waist guns. He stuck his head in
through the hatch, took one look at the mess, and went back
to the waist, praying as he told me lateral the way.
So that was the first miracle of the Ploesti trip-that I had
survived that 88. When we got back to base at Benghazi, no
one could believe what they saw in the cockpit of the
Goldbrick. One half the pilot's completely torn apart; the
other-mine-almost untouched.
But it wasn't all that easy getting back to Benghazi, and
that's the second miracle real unusual stroke of luck if you
will of my visit to Ploesti, the oil capital of Rumania. We'd
clawed our way on two engines up to thirty-five hundred feet,
and I was beginning to breathe easier when whacko! Oil
pressure on Number Four dropped to zilch in about ten
seconds. I could see the black gold streaming out through the
cooler flaps. I pulled off power and feathered, and we were
lucky again: no fire. But that is usual luck, although very
good luck indeed. What was unusual was this: a B-24 can, if
you are very lucky and not heavily loaded, maintain altitude
on one engine. But not with most of the front end of the
airplane missing. No sir. It ruins the streamlining, and as they
used to kid us at Randolph Field, "that which draggeth,
falleth." So I fiddled along without much real hope, trying to
coax the maximum thrust out of that poor, tortured Number
One engine, and calculating how far we had to go in order to
jump into that part of Yugoslavia controlled by Tito.
I boosted the mixture to rich and increased pitch slowly,
trying to keep manifold pressure somewhere in the neighbor-
hood of the red line. And then I discovered it. / could pull the
propeller to full high pitch and the RPM's didn't drop! The