"Pohl, Frederik - The High Test" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

and I'm pretty sure I don't want to know.
Considering that I had to work all day, it hasn't been such a bad Christmas at
that. When I mentioned to Torklemiggen-he's the Fomalhautian I told you
about-that today was a big holiday for us, he sort of laughed and said that
mammals had really quaint customs. And when he found out that part of the custom
was to exchange gifts, he thought for a minute. (The way Fomalhautians think to
themselves is that their heads whisper in each other's ear-really grotesque!)
Then he said that he had been informed it was against the law for a student to
give anything to his driving instructor, but if I wanted to fly his space yacht
myself for a while he'd let me do it. And he would let it go down on the books
of the school as instruction time, so I'd get paid for it. Well, you bet I
wanted to! He has some swell yacht. It's long and tapered, sort of shark-shape,
like the TU-Lockheed 4400 series, with radar-glyph vision screens and a cruising
range of nearly 1,800 l.y. I don't know what its top speed is- after all, we had
to stay in our own system!
We were using his own ship, you see, and of course it's Fomalhautian-made. Not
easy for a human being to fly! Even though I'm supposed to be the instructor and
Torklemiggen the student, I was baffled at first. I couldn't even get it off the
ground until he explained the controls to me and showed me how to read the
instruments. There's still plenty I don't know, but after a few minutes I could
handle it well enough not to kill us out of hand. Torklemiggen kept daring me to
circle the black holes. I told him we couldn't do that, and he got this kind of
sneer on one of his faces, and the two heads sort of whispered together for a
while. I knew he was thinking of something cute, but I didn't know what at
first.
Then I found out!
You know that CAS 43, our primary, is a red giant star with an immense
photosphere. Torklemiggen bragged that we could fly right through the
photosphere! Well, of course I hardly believed him, but he was so insistent that
I tried it out. He was right! We just greased right through that
thirty-thousand-degree plasma like nothing at all! The hull began to turn red,
then yellow, then straw-colored-you could see it on the edges of the radar-glyph
screen-and yet the inside temperature stayed right on the button of 40 degrees
Celsius. That's 43-G normal, by the way. Hot, if you're used to Chicago, but
nothing like it was outside! And when we burst out into vacuum again there was
no thermal shock, no power surge, no instrument fog. Just beautiful! It's hard
to believe that any individual can afford a ship like this just for his private
cruising. I guess Fomalhaut must have some pretty rich planets!
Then when we landed, more than an hour late, there was the Aguilar woman waiting
for me. She had found out that the school wouldn't let her change instructors
once assigned. I could have told her that; it's policy. So she had to cool her
heels until I got back. But I guess she had a little Christmas spirit somewhere
in her ornery frame, because she was quite polite about it. As a matter of fact,
when we had her doing parking orbits, she was much improved over the last time.
Shows what a first-class instructor can do for you!
Well, I see by the old chronometer on the wall that it's the day after Christmas
now, at least Universal-Greenwich Time it is, though I guess you've still got a
couple of hours to go in Chicago. One thing, Mom. The Christmas packages you
sent didn't get here yet. I thought about lying to you and saying they'd come
and how much I liked them, but you raised me always to tell the truth. (Besides,