"Arkady and Boris Strugatsky_Destination Amaltheia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strugatski Arkady)

discovers Varya.

The small observation bay was crammed chock-full with the
planetologists' equipment. Dauge was squatting in front of a big shining
apparatus which looked like an ancient television camera. It was called the
exospheric spectrograph. The planetologists placed great hopes in it. It was
brand-new-straight off assembly line-and worked synchronous with a bomb
release, whose mat-black hatch took up half the space in the bay. Next to it
the flat cases of bomb-probes lay stacked in light metal racks, gleaming
dully. Each case housed twenty bomb-probes and weighed ninety pounds. The
original idea was that the cases should be fed in automatically. But the
Tahmasib, being a cargo rocket, was not fitted out for extensive
research,
and no place had been available for an automatic feeder. So the release was
serviced by Zhilin.
Yurkovsky ordered:
"Load her!"
Zhilin slid the hatch open, took the nearest case, lilted it with an
effort and placed it into the rectangular slit of the loading chamber. The
case slid noiselessly into place. Zhilin closed the breech and said:
"Ready."
"So am I-," said Dauge.
"Mikhail," Yurkovsky called into the mike. "How soon?"
"In half an hour," they heard the navigator's husky voice. The ship
veered again. The floor seemed to fall from under their feet.
"Another meteorite," said Yurkovsky. "The third."
"Rather thick," said Dauge.
Yurkovsky said into the mike:
"Mikhail, many micrometeorites?"
"Plenty, old chap," said Mikhail Antonovich.
His voice sounded worried. "Thirty per cent above mean density and
still thickening...."
"Misha," said Yurkovsky. "Make checkings more often, there's a good
chap."
"I'm doing three a minute as it is," replied the navigator. He said
something aside. Then they heard Bykov's voice rumble in answer: "All
right."
"Vladimir," the navigator called. "I'm switching to ten per minute."
"Thanks, Misha," said Yurkovsky.
The ship veered again.
"I say, Vladimir," Dauge said in an undertone. "This is no longer
trivial."
Zhilin, too, was thinking it wasn't trivial. He couldn't remember
reading anywhere in textbooks or in space charts anything about high
meteoric density in Jupiter's immediate vicinity. But then few people had
been in Jupiter's immediate vicinity, and most of those who had, hadn't come
back to report. For this meant storming Jupiter, not just skirting it.
Zhilin perched on the plate of the hatch and glanced at his watch. Only
twenty minutes to the perijovian. In twenty minutes Dauge would fire the
first stick. The explosion of a stick of bomb-probes was a marvellous sight,