"Niven, Larry - Rammer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

it.

He looked about him until he found the slender darkhaired girl with the elfin face watching him curiously from near the ceiling. He climbed the rungs between bunks until his face was level with her bunk.

He remembered that the gesture he needed was a quick, formalized one; he didn't know it.

In English he asked, "Come with me?"

She nodded brightly and followed him down the ladder. By then it seemed to Corbett that the dorm was alive with barely audible voices.

The odd one, the rammer trainee.

Certainly a number of the wakeful turned to lie on their sides to watch.

He felt their eyes on the back of his neck as he zipped open his gray jumpsuit and stepped out of it. The dormitory had been a series of tests. At least two of those eyes must belong to someone who would report to Pierce or to Pierce's bosses. But to Corbett they were just like the others, all the eyes curiously watching to see how the speechless one would make out.

And sure enough, he was impotent. It was the eyes-and he was naked. The girl was first concerned, then pitying. She stroked his cheek in apology or sympathy and then she went away and found someone else.

Corbett lay listening to them, gazing at the bunk above him.

He waited for eight hours. Finally a guard came to take him away. By then he didn't care what they did with him.

He didn't start to care until the guard's floating jeep pulled up beneath an enormous .22 long cartridge standing on end. Then he began to wonder. It was too small to be a rocket ship.

But it was one. They strapped him into a contour couch, one of three in a cabin with a single window. There were the guard type and Corbett and a man who might have been Pierce's second cousin once removed. He had the window. He also had the controls.

Corbett's heartbeat quickened. He wondered how it would be.

It was as if he had suddenly become very heavy. He heard no noise except right at the beginning-a sound like landing gear being raised on an airplane. Not a rocket, Corbett thought-and he remembered the tricks a Bussard ramjet could play with magnetic fields. He was heavy and he hadn't slept a wink last night. He went to sleep.

When he awoke he was in free fall. Nobody had tried to tell him anything about free fall. The guard and the pilot watched him curiously to see what he would do.

"Screw you," said Corbett.

It was another test. He got the straps open and pushed him self over to the window. The pilot laughed, caught him an held him while he closed a protective cover over the instruments. Then he let go and Corbett drifted before the window

His belly was revolving eccentrically. His inner ear was going crazy. His testicles were tight up against his groin and that didn't feel good either. He felt as if the elevator-cable had snapped. Corbett snarled within his mind and tried to concentrate on the window. But the Earth was not visible. Neither was the moon. Just a lot of stars, bright enough- quite bright in fact-even more brilliant than they had been above a small boat anchored off Catalina Island one night long ago. He watched them for some time.

Trying to keep his mind off that falling elevator.

He wasn't about to get himself disqualified now.

They ate aboard in free fall. Corbett copied the others, picking chunks of meat and potatoes out of a plastic bag of stew, pulling them through a membrane that sealed itself behind his pick.

"Of all the things I'm going to miss," he told the broad-faced guard, "I'm going to enjoy missing you most. You and your goddamn staring eyes.''

The guard smiled placidly and waited to see if Corbett would get sick.

They landed a day after takeoff on a broad plain where the Earth sat nestled in a row of sharp lunar peaks. One day instead of four-the State had expended extra power to get him here. But an Earth-moon flight must be a small thing these days.