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

The plain was black with blast pits. It must have been a landing field for decades. Enormous transparent bubbles with trees and buildings inside them clustered near the runway end of the linear accelerator, and spacecraft of various types were scattered about the plain.

The biggest was Corbett's ramship: a silver skyscraper lying on its side. The probes were in place, giving the ship a thickwaisted appearance. To Corbett's trained eye it looked ready for takeoff.

Corbett donned his suit first, while the pilot and guard watched to see if he would make a mistake. It was the first time he had seen a suit off the teaching screen. He took it slowly.

There was an electric cart. Apparently Corbett was not expected to know how to walk on an airless world. He thought to head for one of the domes, but the guard steered straight for the ramship. It was a long way off.

It had become unnervingly large when the guard stopped underneath.

The guard said, "Now you inspect your ship."

"You can talk?"

"Yes. Yesterday, a quickie course."

"Three things wrong with your ship. You find all three. You tell me, I tell him."

"Him? Oh, the pilot. Then what?"

"Then you fix one of the things, we fix the others. Then we launch you." It was another test, of course, maybe the last. Corbett was furious.

He started immediately with the field generators and gradually he forgot the guard and the pilot and the sword still hanging over his head, He knew this ship. As it had been with the teaching chair, so it was with the ship itself. Corbett's impotence changed to omnipotence. The power of the beast, the intricacy, the potential, the - - the hydrogen tank held far too much pressure. That wouldn't wait.

"I'll slurry this now " he told the guard. Get a tanker over there to top it off." He bled gas slowly through the gauge. lowering the fuel's vapor pressure without letting fuel boil out the gauge itself. When he finished, the liquid hydrogen would be slushy with frozen crystals under near-vacuum pressure.

He finished the external inspection without finding any thing more. It figured: the banks of dials held vastly more in formation ( than a man's eyes could read through opaque titan alloy skin.

The airlock was a triple-door type, not so much to save air as to give him an airlock even if he lost a door somehow. Corbett shut the outer door, used the others as green lights indicated he could. He looked down at the telltales under his chin as he started to unclamp his helmet.

Vacuum?

He stopped. The ship's gauges said air. The suit's said vacuum. Which was right? Come to think of it, he hadn't heard any hissing. Just how soundproof was his helmet?

Just like Pierce to wait and see if he would take off his helmet in vacuum. Well, how to test?

Hah! Corbett found the head, turned on a water spigot The water splashed oddly in lunar gravity. It did not boil.

Corbett doffed his helmet and continued his inspection.

There was no way to test the electromagnetic motors with. out causing all kinds of havoc in the linear accelerator. He checked out the telltales as best he could, then concentrated on the life-support mechanisms. The tailored plants in the air system were alive and well. But the urea absorption mechanism was plugged somehow. That would be a dirty job. He postponed it.

Did a flaw in his suit constitute a flaw in the ship?

He decided to finish the inspection. The State might have missed something. It was his ship, his life.

The cold sleep chamber was like a great coffin, a corpsicle coffin. Corbett shuddered at the sight of it. It reminded him of two hundred years spent waiting in liquid nitrogen. He wondered again if Jerome Corbett were really dead-and then he shook off the wonder and went to work.

No flaw there.