"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Hell on Earth (english)" - читать интересную книгу автора

The pressure dropped so gradually, we didn't even
notice. After a while I found myself panting for air
after climbing a ladder, and Arlene had to rest after
every heavy part she handed me.
Then a couple of days later, I realized my mind was '
wandering in the middle of a task. I focused, then
wandered again.
Arlene was able to maintain her concentration;
maybe being smaller, she didn't need as high a partial
pressure of oxygen. But both of us were getting mighty
cold.
When I saw Arlene shivering while working, I made
her throw on a couple of sweaters and did the same.
We wore gloves, except that I kept removing mine
because it interfered with the work. Then my hands
would turn to ice, and I'd put them back on to warm
up before taking another stab at attaching the fine
filaments that ran microvolts to the plasma globules.
Suddenly, the air-pressure sensor started screaming
its fool head off. Arlene and I exchanged a worried
glance, but we didn't need to be told twice. It was time
to start hitting the raw stuff, O2 neat. We took hits off
the same oxygen bottle, trying to limit ourselves to a
few breaths every hour or so, or when we started to get
dizzy or goofy.
But we just didn't have that much bottled oxygen.
Uncle Sugar packed a lot of air into a single bottle; but
even so, even at the slow pace we used it, we'd run out
of breathing oxygen in just a few more days. We had
more bottles, but we needed them for fuel mixing.
And of course we'd need to breathe more frequently
as the pressure droppedЧparadoxically, it was drop-
ping slower now, since there was less pressure in the
dome to push the air out.
We stretched the bottles as long as we could, but
they ran out while there was still plenty of work left.
I'd done mountain climbing in my native Colorado
before joining the Corps; as the air grew thinner, I
tried to help Arlene deal with it. "Breathe shallowly,"
I said. "Rest, and don't talk except for the job."
The physical exertion wasn't any less, though. We'd
have to stop frequently, gasping and panting. We tired
easily and needed more sleep, but stayed on the four-
hour rotations, creating a cycle of exhaustion we
couldn't break. But sleeping longer would just make
the job take longer, and the pressure would drop lower
in the meantime.
Low pressure is insidious. There are obvious ef-
fects: exhaustion, trouble breathing, and cold. But
there are other symptoms people don't often think