"James White - Lifeboat" - читать интересную книгу автора (White James)

this, sir.
You're obviously busy and he knows better than to..."
"It's quite all right, m'am," began Mercer, but already she was dragging her
son towards the largest group of passengers, still scolding and apologizing
and not listening to him at all.
For a few minutes he watched the boy in the space officer's outfit and his
mother in the issue coveralls which the passengers wore shipside. The
one-piece coverall was not exactly shapeless-especially not in Mrs.
Mathewson's case-but it obeyed the dictates of the current neo-puritan
fashion, which insisted on covering the female form on public occasions from
neck to ankles.
Suddenly restless. Mercer stuffed the papers back into his briefcase and stood
up. He began pacing slowly around the empty end of the lounge, staring at the
large, full-color pictures which were closely spaced along the walls so that
he would not have to look at, and perhaps become involved with, the
passengers. His first contact with two of them had not exactly helped his
self-confidence.
Like the background music, the pictures were designed to be reassuring-there
was only one take-off, a few interior shots, and the rest showed Eurydice or
her sister ships coming in to land beneath enormous, brightly-colored
dirigible parachutes, or floating in the ten-miles-distant landing lake and
held upright by a collar of inflated life pods while the passengers slid
laughing down a transparent tube into a waiting boat.
The pictures stressed the Happy Return rather than the Voyage itself. Mercer
thought cynically as he moved to the big periscopic window, which looked out
over the field.
Two miles away, Eurydice stood by her gantry, clean but for the passenger
boarding bridge. Only the topmost hundred feet or so of the ship proper,
comprising the control room, crew quarters and the upper members of the
structure which supported the rotating section, was visible. The service and
life-support modules, water tank, and nuclear power unit were wrapped in thick
swathes of boosters. A mile farther down the line stood the empty gantry which
had serviced Minerva before her departure four months earlier, and beyond
that, rippling faintly in the heat, there rose a ship identical to Eurydice
except for its much larger and more complex wrapping of boosters.
Nobody talked about that particular ship, and it did not have a name. Like the
homecoming pictures scattered around the lounge, it was meant to be a
reassuring sight, but somehow it was nothing of the kind.
The only difference between the passengers and himself, Mercer thought sourly,
was that he had nobody to talk loudly and nervously to...
"Eurydice, sir?"
He turned to find a hostess standing behind him.
She was wearing one of the old-style mirror plastic uniforms-described as
pseudo-futuristic by female fashion writers and with animal growls of
appreciation by men regardless of occupation-and for the first few seconds
that was all he saw. He was vaguely aware of glittering boots, a hat
streamlined for Mach Three and short cloak thrown back over shoulders that
were a flawless, creamy pink, and intensely aware of the rest of the get-up,
which was virtually topless and wellnigh bottomless. When he finally raised
his eyes, Mercer discovered that she was not just a beautiful body- she had a