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

which had just returned from a six-month wandering in the AFF zone. The
robot had travelled away from the Sun to a distance of one light-month. It
was a huge ungainly job of a surprising turquoise-green colour. The sheeting
fell away in pieces when they touched it. It just crumbled away as dry bread
would. But its controls were in working order, or it wouldn't have
returned-like three scouts out of the nineteen sent out into the AFF zone.
The students wanted to know what had happened to the robot but Lyakhov said
he didn't know. "At great distances from the Sun there's something we still
don't know anything about," he said. And his thoughts turned to the men who
in a few years' time would steer the Hius-Lightning to that region
where
there was something about which we didn't know anything.
Funny, thought Zhilin, I already have quite a few things to remember
myself. Take that time, for instance, on a practice flight in a geodesic
rocket when the engine cut dead and I plopped down with my rocket in a
state-farm field near Novoyeniseisk. I wandered among the automatic HF
ploughs for hours until by the evening I came across a remote control man.
That night we lay in his tent watching the lights on the ploughs traverse
the dark field, and when a plough chugged by, whiffs of ozone wafted to us.
The man plied me with local wine and chafed me and, I still think I left him
unconvinced that space flyers do not drink. In the morning a tractor-haul
came for the rocket. Iron Chen gave me a rocket, too, for failing to
catapult....
Or my diploma Spu-16 Earth-Giphei Moon flight when a member of the
examination panel tried to confuse us by yelling the input data in a panicky
voice: "Asteroid, third magnitude, on the starboard! Rate of enclosure
twenty-two!" and the like. There were six of us and we were all sick and
tired of the chap, though Jan, the monitor, tried to persuade us people
should be forgiven their small weaknesses. We agreed in principle but
couldn't forgive that particular weakness. We all thought it was a clueless
flight and none of us felt any fear when suddenly the ship went into a
terrific bank under 4 G's. We scrambled into the control room, where the
member of the panel was pretending the overgravity had killed him, and
righted her. Then the man opened one eye and said, "Good show, space
flyers," and we forgave him all his weaknesses there and then. Before him
nobody had called us that in earnest, except our mothers and girl friends,
but when saying, "My dear space flyer," they had a look as though they were
about to burst into tears.
At that moment the Tahmasib was shaken with such a force that
Zhilin
fell backwards, knocking his head against the bomb-rack.
"Damn," said Yurkovsky. "It may be untrivial but if the ship's going to
yaw like that we won't
get much work done."
"No," said Dauge, his hand pressed to his right eye, "indeed we won't."
Apparently there were more and more large meteorites straight ahead and
the cyber-navigator, on orders from the overworked meteorite finders, was
jerking the ship crazily out of their paths.
"Surely not a swarm?" Yurkovsky said, clutching at the periscope frame.
"Poor Varya, she doesn't like being shaken."