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

 "Oh," said Bykov. "Good. Where're we now?"
"In an hour's time we begin the finish part of it," said Mikhail
Antonovich. "We'll pass over Jupiter's north pole," he pronounced the word
"Jupiter" with visible relish, "at a distance of two diameters, about one
hundred and eighty thousand miles. Then for the last spiral. We may consider
we're already there, old chap."
"You calculated the distance from Jupiter's centre?"
"Yes."
"When we begin the finish, report the distance from the exosphere every
quarter of an hour."
"O.K."
Bykov yawned again, rubbed his sore, sleepy eyes vexedly and passed on
to the alarm system panel. Everything was in order there. The propulsion
plant operated normally, the plasma was injected as required, the tuning of
the magnetic traps was kept very tight. The magnetic traps were the
responsibility of Engineer Ivan Zhilin. Good for you, Zhilin, thought Bykov.
First-class tuning for a raw hand.
Bykov halted and tried, by slightly changing the course, to break the
tuning. It held. The white spot behind the translucent plastic would not
even waver. Good for you, Zhilin, Bykov thought again. He went round the
bulging bulkhead-the photon reactor casing. At the reflector control combine
stood Zhilin, his pencil between his teeth. He was leaning over the control
panel, his hands on its edge, tap-dancing almost imperceptibly, his powerful
shoulder-blades moving on his bent back.
"Hello, Vanya," said Bykov.
"Hello, Alexei Petrovich," Zhilin said, whirling round. The pencil
slipped from his teeth and he caught it smartly in mid air. Zhilin was
twenty-three years old, just out of the High School of Cosmogation.
"How's the reflector?" asked Bykov.
"The reflector's in order," said Zhilin, but Bykov leaned over the
control panel all the same and pulled at the hard, blue tape of the
recorder.
The reflector, or the sail, as it is also called, is the principal and
most fragile part of a photon rocket. It is a gigantic parabolic mirror,
coated with five layers of superhard mesosubstance. Every second thousands
of portions of the deuterium-cum-tritium plasma explode at the focus of the
parabola and are transformed into radiation. The pallid lilac flame hits the
surface of the reflector and creates thrust. As this goes on the
mesosubstance is subjected to tremendous changes in temperature and
gradually burns away, layer by layer. Besides, the reflector is eaten away
by meteoric corrosion. And if, when the propulsion unit was on, the
reflector were to collapse at the base where it is joined by the thick tube
of the photon reactor, the ship would go in one silent flash. To avoid this
the reflectors of photon ships are replaced after every hundred astronomical
units of flight. And this also is why a control system is constantly
checking on the working layer all over the reflector's surface.
"Well," Bykov said, examining the tape. "The first layer's burnt away."
Zhilin didn't say anything.
"Mikhail," Bykov called out to the navigator. "Did you know the first
layer was burnt out?"