"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Endgame (english)" - читать интересную книгу автораinto the hunk of rock at a couple of hundred kilome-
ters per second, punching out a crater the size of the Gulf of Mexico and, incidentally, atomizing us and the ship. It all depended on Sears and Roebuck. Arlene and I offered to helpЧwe told them about our brilliant piloting of the makeshift mail-rocket coming down from the relocated Deimos moon to Earth's surfaceЧ but the Klave just looked at each other, each putting his gorilla-size hand on the other's head, and pumped their crania up and down. We took it to be laughter that timeЧderisive laughter. I had no idea how good a pilot Sears and Roebuck were, but I had a bad feeling it was like the President taking the stick of Air Force One when the pilot has a heart attack. Better than giving it to the presidential janitor, though, which was basically where Arlene and I stood in the pecking order. God, how I wished we hadn't left Commander Taylor back at the Hyperreal- ist military base! That babe could fly anything. The other big problem was that unlike back at Fredworld, we had no friendly pinwheel launcher to catch us here and lower us more or less gently to the surface. We were entirely on our own. The rest of the journey was uneventful, including various emergency drills, just for something to do: one of the biggest problems with spaceflight is the incredible, relentless boredom, but if there's one thing the Marine Corps teaches you to handle, it's ennui. We were always sitting on our hands, waiting for somebody further up the food chain to finish a mysterious errand, while the rest of us jarheads, men with stripes on our sleeves, waited for The Word. It wasn't like they let any grass grow under our feet. There's always something to do around a military base, even if it's just putting a nice polish on the brass cannon on the stone steps at Pensacola (or scrubbing the base CO's hardwood office floor with tooth- brushes). If you manage to "miss" your gunny or your top, you might find yourself with a whole afternoon free, but there was always the NCO club to soak up any extra dollars. On the Fred ship, it was both more and less difficult to find something to do for weeks and weeksЧharder because there weren't any butterbars, silverbells, or railroad tracks to tell us what to do, but easier because we were on an alien space ship full of strange and wonderful things to poke and monkey with, three main corridors of 3.7 kilometers each at 0.8 g and one |
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