"Eric Frank Russel - The Great Explosion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Eric Frank)

Majestically the monster vessel swung into a long, shallow curve to starboard,
losing velocity as it went. Two thousand men bowed, leaned or rolled the opposite
way. In the trooper's quarters kit fell out of starboard bunks and dived to port to
the accompaniment of general invective. Sergeant Major Bid-worthy roared for
silence and followed it up with a string of threats. Nobody took any notice.

Completing its curve, the ship drifted to a stop, hung momentarily in mid-air, then
began to sink. Its enormous tonnage went down gently and under perfect control
in a way that the log-dead Blieder would have considered miraculous. Indeed,
even those thoroughly accustomed to such ships never quite got over their sense
of wonder at floating down to land, never completely rid themselves of the uneasy
feeling that for once something might go wrong and result in one hell of a crash.
No Blieder-drive ship had done a dead fall to date-but there always has to be a

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first time.

So the crew went down with grossly exaggerated sangfroid while the troops and
bureaucrats descended with queasy stomachs. At fifty feet from the ground
Grayder boosted the ship a little forward to position it exactly as he wanted. This
caught all but the crew napping. Bureaucrats slid on their official backsides across
metal floors, troopers rolled rearward over each other in a mad tangle of bodies,
arms and equipment and amid a torrent of oaths. Clinging to a bulkhead,
Bidworthy recited the names of those to be shot at dawn. Apparently he was
contemplating a massacre.

The ship touched, settled, sank twelve feet deep into hard soil. Crunching,
cracking sounds came through the keel as buried boulders split and powdered
under great pressure. Power cut off. The bureaucrats picked themselves up with
injured dignity, dusted themselves and polished their glasses. The troops sorted
themselves out and started surlily restacking their kit while Bidworthy raved at
them.

A bell rang in the power-room, the signal to open the port midway airlock. Chief
Engineer McKechnie switched on the motor operating the release-gear while
Tenth Engineer Harrison went to check that the lock was working properly. He
was joined there by Sergeant Gleed, a leather-faced trooper eager to set eyes upon
solid earth.

The airlock's outer plug wound inward, swung aside to reveal a pastoral scene that
Gleed drank in like a thirsty camel. Lush grassland led from the ship to a broad,
sharply curving river on the opposite side of which a large building-or a tightly
packed conglomeration of small ones-stood on the neck of land. Something that
looked remarkably like a sailing ship's mainmast complete with crow's-nest arose
high from the middle of this assembly. In the center of the river one man in a
canoe was paddling fast toward the other side.