"Theodore Sturgeon - The Man Who Lost The Sea2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

to his left, disappear in the outcrop shadows, and reappear beyond to vanish at last into the
shadows of the valley.

Stretched across the sky is old mourning-cloth, with starlight burning holes in it, and
between the holes the black is absolute-wintertime, mountaintop sky-black.

(Far off on the horizon within himself, he sees the swell and crest of approaching nausea; he
counters with an undertow of weakness, which meets and rounds and settles the wave before it can
break. Get busier. Now.)

Burst in on him, then, with the X-15 model. That'll get him. Hey, how about this for a
gimmick? Get too high for the thin air to give you any control, you have these little jets in the
wingtips, see? and on the sides of the empennage: bank, roll, yaw, whatever, with squirts of
compressed air.



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But the sick man curls his sick lip: oh, git, kid, git, will you?-that has nothing to do with
the sea. So you git.

Out 'and out the sick man forces his view, etching all he sees with a meticulous intensity, as
if it might be his charge, one day, to duplicate all this, To his left is only starlit sea,
windless. In front of him across the valley, rounded hills with dim white epaulettes of light. To
his right, the jutfing corner of the black wall against which his helmet rests. (He thinks the
distant moundings of nausea becalmed, but he will not look yet.) ~So he scans the sky, black and
bright, calling Sirius, calling Pleiades, Polaris, Ursa Minor, calling that . . . that . . . Why,
it moves. Watch it: yes, it moves! It is a fleck of light, seeming to be wrinkled, fissured,
rather like a chip of boiled cauliflower in the sky. (Of course, he knows better than to trust his
own eyes just now.) But that movement

As a child he had stood on cold sand in a frosty Cape Cod

evening, watching Sputnik's steady spark rise out of the haze (madly, dawning a little north
of west); and after that he had sleeplessly wound special coils for his receiver, risked his life
restringing high antennas, all for the brief capture of an unreadable tweetle-eep-tweetle in his
earphones from Vanguard, Explorer, Lunik, Discoverer, Mercury. He knew them all (well, some people
collect match-covers, stamps) and he knew especially that unmistakable steady sliding in the sky.

This moving fleck was a satellite, and in a moment, motionless, uninstrumented but for his
chronometer and his part-brain, he will know which one. (He is grateful beyond expression-without
that sliding chip of light, there were only those footprints, those wandering footprints, to tell
a man he was not alone in the world.)

Say you were a kid, eager and challengeable and more than a little bright, you might in a day
or so work out a way to measui~e the period of a satellite with nothing but a timepiece and a
brain; you might eventually see that the shadow in the rocks ahead had been there from the first