"Theodore Sturgeon - The Girl Had Guts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

mouth. Sue had liked him, though; well, Sue was always that way, always going a bit out of her way to
get upwind of an animal like that. And I guess I'm one of 'em myself; anyway, it was me she married. I
said, "I'm afraid ol' Purcell's either a blowhard or he was just out of character when we rounded up the
crew and brought 'em all back. We found 'em in honky-tonks and strip joints; we found 'em in the
buzzoms of their families behaving like normal family men do after a long trip; but Purcell, we found him
at the King George Hotel"тАФI emphasized with a forefingerтАФ"alone by himself and fast asleep, where he
tells us he went as soon as he got earthside. Said he wanted a soak in a hot tub and twenty-four hours
sleep in a real 1-G bed with sheets. How's that for a sailor ashore on his first leave?"

She'd gotten up to get me more ale. "I haven't finished this one yet!" I said.

She said "Oh" and sat down again. "You were going to tell me about the trip."

"I was? Oh, all right, I was. But listen carefully, because this is one trip I'm going to forget as fast as I
can, and I'm not going to do it again, even in my head."




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I don't have to tell you about blast-offтАФthat it's more like drift-off these days, since all long hops start
from Outer Orbit satellites, out past the MoonтАФor about the flicker-field by which we hop faster than
light, get dizzier than a five-year-old on a drug-store stool, and develop more morning sickness than
Mom. That I've told you before.
So I'll start with planetfall on Mullygantz II, Terra's best bet to date for a colonial planet, five-nines Earth
Normal (that is, .99999) and just about as handsome a rock as ever circled a sun. We hung the blister in
stable orbit, and Purcell and I dropped down in a super-scout with supplies and equipment for the
ecological survey station. We expected to find things humming there, five busy people and a sheaf of
completed reports, and we hoped we'd be the ones to take back the news that the next ship would be
the colony ship. We found three dead and two sick, and knew right away that the news we'd be taking
back was going to stop the colonists in their tracks.

Clement was the only one I'd known personally. Head of the station, physicist and ecologist both, and
tops both ways, and he was one of the dead. Joe and Katherine Flent were dead. Amy Segal, the
recorderтАФone of the best in Pioneer ServiceтАФwas sick in a way I'll go into in a minute, and Glenda
Spooner, the plant biologist, wasтАФwell, call it withdrawn. Retreated. Something had scared her so badly
that she could only sit with her arms folded and her legs crossed and her eyes wide open, rocking and
watching.

Anyone gets to striking hero medals ought to make a platter-sized one for Amy Segal. Like I said, she
was sick. Her body temperature was wildly erratic, going from 102 all the way down to 96 and back up
again. She was just this side of breakdown and must have been like that for weeks, slipping across the
line for minutes at a time, hauling herself back for a moment or two, then sliding across again. But she
knew Glenda was helpless, though physically in perfect shape, and she knew that even automatic
machinery has to be watched. She not only dragged herself around keeping ink in the recording pens and
new charts when the seismo's and hygro's and airsonde recorders needed them, but she kept Glenda fed;
more than that, she fed herself.
She fed herself close to fifteen thousand calories a day. And she was forty pounds underweight. She