"Russell, Eric Frank - Symbiotica" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Eric Frank)

SYMBIOTICA by Eric Frank Russell

They had commissioned the Marathon to look over a
likely planet floating near Rigel and what some of us would
have liked to learn was how the devil our Terrestrial
astronomers could select worthwhile subjects at such an
enormous distance.

Last trip they'd found us a juicy job when they'd sent us
to that mechanical world and its watery neighbour near
Bootes. The Marathon, a newly designed Flettner boat, was
something super and had no counterpart in our neck of the
cosmos. So our solution of the mystery was that the
astronomers had got hold of some instrument equally
revolutionary.

Anyway, we had covered the outward trip as per instructions
and had come near enough to see that once again the
astronomers had justified their claim to expertness when
they'd said that here was a planet likely to hold life.

Over to starboard Rigel blazed like a distant furnace
about thirty degrees above the plane which was horizontal
at that moment. By that I mean the horizontal plane always
is the ship's horizontal plane to which the entire cosmos had
to relate itself whether it likes it or not. But this planet's
primary wasn't the far-off Rigel: its own sun- much nearer
- looked a fraction smaller and rather yellower than Old Sol.

Two more planets lay farther out and we'd seen another
one swinging round the opposite side of the sun, That
made four in all, but three were as sterile as a Venusian
guppy's mind and only this, the innermost one, seemed
interesting.

We swooped upon it bow first. The way that world
swelled in the observation-ports did things to my bowels.
One trip on the casually meandering Upsydaisy had given
me my space-legs and made me accustomed to living in
suspense over umpteen million miles of nothingness, but I
reckoned it was going to take me another century or two to
become hardened to the mad bull take-offs and landings of
these Flettner craft.

Young Wilson in his harness followed his pious custom
of praying for the safety of his photographic plates. From
his expression of spiritual agony you'd have thought he
was married to the darned things. We landed, kerumph!
The boat did a hectic belly-slide.