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

he said. The year before he'd studied the atmosphere of Uranus with just
such bomb-probes. Zhilin turned to look at Dauge. He was squatting in front
of the spectrograph, his hands on the turn-lever, lean, swarthy,
sharp-nosed, with a scar on his left cheek. He would crane his long neck
every now and then, looking into the eyepiece of the viewer first with one
eye, then with the other, and every time an orange spot of light would
flicker across his face. Then Zhilin looked at Yurkovsky. He was standing,
his face close to the periscope, shifting impatiently from foot to foot. The
many-faceted egg of the mike dangled from his neck on a dark tape. Dauge and
Yurkovsky, the well-known planetologists....
 Just a month back it was that Chen Run, deputy chief of the High School
of Cosmogation, had summoned graduate Ivan Zhilin.
Chen Kun was known as Iron Chen among space flyers. He was past fifty
but looked quite young in his navy-blue jacket with turn-down collar. He
would have been quite handsome, too, but for the pinkish-grey patches on
forehead and chin-reminders of an old ray stroke. He told Zhilin that the
Third Department of the State Committee for Space Flights was in urgent need
of a good relief engineer and that the School Council had decided to
recommend him, graduate Zhilin (at this graduate Zhilin tingled with
excitement: all those five years he'd been fearing they would send him on
lunar routes on probation). Chen Kun said it was a great honour for a
graduate to be given as his first assignment a job on board a ship flying
oversun to Jupiter (graduate Zhilin nearly jumped with joy), carrying
provisions for a J-Station on Amaltheia, Jupiter's fifth satellite.
Amaltheia was facing hunger, said Chen Kun.
"What's more," said Iron Chen, "you will have as your commander the
renowned space flyer, Alexei Petrovich Bykov-also a graduate of our School.
With him and senior navigator Mikhail Antonovich Krutikov-a man of vast
experience, you will go through a first-rate practical school and I must say
I am very glad for you."
That Grigory Dauge and Vladimir Yurkovsky were going too Zhilin learnt
later, already on the Mirza-Charle spacedrome. What names! Yurkovsky and
Dauge, Bykov and Krutikov, Bogdan Spitsin and Anatoly Yermakov. Since his
childhood he had known the legend, beautiful yet frightening, that had been
woven round the names of that handful of men who had conquered a formidable
planet for mankind. He thought of them now, of the men who on an
antediluvian Hius-a photon tub with a single layer of mesosubstance
on the
reflector-pierced the Venusian atmosphere and in the primordial black
sand-wastes discovered a uranium Golconda- the spot where a mammoth
meteorite of anti-substance had hit the planet.
Zhilin knew other remarkable spacemen of course. For instance, the test
flyer Vasily Lyakhov who had lectured on the theory of photon propulsion to
the third- and fourth-year students. He organised a three-month practical
course on Spu-20 for last-year students. Space flyers called Spu-20 the
Starlet, and Zhilin found it fascinating. The first ram photon engines were
tested there; robot scouts were sent from there into the zone of absolute
free fall; the first astroship Hius-Lightning was being built there.
One day
Lyakhov took the students into a hangar. In it was a photon robot refueller