"Timothy Zahn - Manta's Gift" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

pressed the button.

There was the crack of explosive bolts, and the moaning of the wind outside was joined by a violent
hiss as the tanks of compressed helium began dumping their contents into the probe's rubber-raft
pontoons. Faraday held his breath...

And then, with another horrible twisting of his stomach, the Skydiver rolled over onto its right side.

"Malfunction!" he barked, eyes darting to the error display as all his weight slammed down onto his
ribs and his right armrest. The words flashed onto the screen in bright redтАФ"Starboard tank's
blocked," he reported tightly. A support slide unfurled from the right collar of his suit, moving into
position along the side of his head to relieve the strain the change in attitude had put on his neck.
"No helium's getting into the float."

"Must be water in the valve," Chippawa said grimly from his seat, now hanging directly above
Faraday. "Firing secondary."

Faraday held his breath, straining his ears for the sound of hissing helium. But there was nothing.

And the error message was still glaring red at him.

"Secondary also malfunctioning," Chippawa reported. "Damn water must be in the line, not the
valves. The expanding helium's frozen it into a solid plug."

And they were still going down. "Any way to get to it?" Faraday asked.

Chippawa shook his head, an abbreviated wobbling around his own suit's neck support. "Not from
inside. It's bound to fix itself sooner or laterтАФit's over three hundred Kelvin out there."

He clucked his teeth thoughtfully. "Question is, will it unfreeze in time to do us any good?"

Faraday's stomach felt ill, and not just from the deadly gravity. Already they were too deep for any
chance of rescue from the tether ship. Now, they were drifting still deeper.

And as they did so, the rising atmospheric pressure would begin to compress their one working float,
reducing its already inadequate buoyancy and making them fall still faster. After that, even if the
other float fixed itself, the pressure of its helium tank wouldn't be enough to deploy it.

That was the physics of it. The cold reality of it was that he and Chippawa were dead.

They would be crushed to death. That would be the final end of it The fragile walls of their capsule
would shatter under the pressure from outside, shatter into a million pieces that would drive inward
into their bodies like shrapnel.

And behind that shrapnel would come the full weight of Jupiter's atmosphere, squeezing in on them.
Their blood vessels would explode; their bones would break; their skulls would shatter like empty
eggshells. Crushed to death.

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