"Arthur Tofte - Crash Landing on Iduna" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tofte Arthur)

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Crash Landing on Iduna by
Arthur Tofte

PART I
STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL
CHAPTER ONE
We were in troubleтАж deep troubleтАж the kind that every spacefarer
dreaded.

There was a sudden, heart-stopping change in the rhythm of our flight.
Instead of the smooth swish of our landing jets, there was now alternate
silence and a roaring violence of jet-rocketry running wild.

There was no pattern to it. The ship itself seemed to falter and slip, to
twist and tumble. Over and over we were going on a wild, uncontrolled
mad ride.

Up to that moment everything had gone along perfectly. After months
of search, we had found this uncharted, apparently uninhabited planet out
near the edge of the galaxy. We had orbited it several times. After making
the usual tests for night and day temperatures, atmosphere quality,
harmful ray shielding, water supply, vegetation, and all other
life-sustaining factors, father had decided that this was it. This was to be
our planet!

Father even gave it a name as soon as he made the decision to land. He
said we would call it Iduna, our mother's name. He said in old Norse
mythology, Iduna was the 'keeper of the golden apples of youth.' That, he
declared, was what we needed on our new planet-home тАФto find the
golden apples of eternal youth.

But nowтАФI shuddered to think what was happeningтАж

I could picture my father, Lars Evenson, ship designer and
astronavigator, in the front control section wrestling with the retro-jet
levers. After switching over from our interstellar power plant to the
landing jets, something had gone wrong, very wrong. And I could envision
my mother sitting next to him giving all the assistance she could in
operating emergency controls.

I glanced around at my three siblings. All were well harnessed in their
pods. Ingo, a year younger than my own twenty years, smiled back at me