"E. E. Doc Smith - Lensman 3 - Galactic Patrol" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

Then, again all martinet.
"Class Five, attention!" he barked. "Report upon the stage of the main
auditorium!"
The Class, again a rigidly military unit, marched out of Room A and down
the
long corridor toward the great theater in which, before the massed Cadet Corps
and a
throng of civilians, they were formally to be graduated.
And as they marched along the graduates realized in what way the wearers of
the Lens who emerged from Room A were different from the candidates who had
entered. it such a short time before. They had gone in as boys, nervous,
apprehensive,
and still somewhat unsure of themselves, in spite of their survival through the
five long
years of grueling tests which now lay behind them They emerged from Room A as
men,
men knowing for the first time the real meaning of the physical and mental
tortures they
had undergone, men able to wield justly the vast powers whose scope and scale
they
could even now but dimly comprehend.

CHAPTER 2

In Command

Barely a month after his graduation, even before he had entirely completed the
post-
graduate tours of duty mentioned by von Hohendorff, Kinnison was summoned to
Prime
Base by no less a personage than Port Admiral Haynes himself. There, in the
Admiral's
private aero, whose flaring lights cut a right-of-way through the swarming
traffic, the
novice and the veteran flew slowly over the vast establishment of the Base.
Shops and factories, city-like barracks, landing-fields stretching beyond
the far
horizon, flying craft ranging from tiny one-man helicopters through small and
large
scouts, patrol-ships and cruisers up to the immense, globular superdreadnaughts
of
space -- all these were observed and commented upon. Finally the aero landed
beside
a long, comparatively low building тАУ a structure heavily guarded, inside Base
although it
was -- within which Kinnison saw a thing that fairly snatched away his breath.
A space-ship it was -- but what a ship! In bulk it was vastly larger even
than the
superdreadnaughts of the Patrol, but, unlike them, it was .in shape a perfect
teardrop,