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

at zero-g.
I actually learned to tolerate zero-g for several
hours at a time with only a slight floaty feeling in my
stomach. Arlene loved it, naturally. The central shaft
that I called the zero-g corridor was dodecahedral,
according to A.S.Чit had twelve sides. But the cor-
ners weren't sharp, they were rounded off, and the
sides were not very symmetrical in any case. Like
everything else in Fredland, the entire corridor disori-
ented me, like looking at one of those paintings by
Picasso where the eyes are head-on, but the nose is in
profile. There was a totally cool red pulse that traveled
the length of the shaftЧfrom back to front, oddly
enoughЧthat reminded me so much of an old sci-fi
flick that we dubbed it the Warp Coil Pulse. The walls
must have been light panels or LEDs or something; I
don't know where the illumination came from . . .
there was no source that we ever found.
We invented a few reindeer games to play when we
got tired of training, marching, and drilling. (I made
sure Arlene and I kept up on our parade and close-
order drill; we may have been lost in space, but we
were still the United States Freaking Marine Corps,
Goddamn it!) One Arlene got from an old sci-fi book
by Heinlein: you start at one end of the corridor and
"dive" toward the other end, doing flips or spins or
butterflies or some other gymnastic feat, seeing how
far you can get and how many maneuvers you can
perform before you crash against the side. She never
did get all the way, but after the first couple of weeks, I
always did, much to Arlene's annoyance.
I thought Sears and Roebuck would be too staid
and respectable to join in any reindeer games. Hah!
They were always the first to get tired of the milspec
crap and demand we go play. I guess decadence is
more than anything else the need to play games to
drive away the boredom demon.
Having demonstrated their insanity by volunteer-
ing to go on our expedition, far from any possibility of
resurrection if they should "die," Sears and Roebuck
proved their fearlessness in the risks they would take
just for a thrill. Once, they put on space suits from
their fanny packs, climbed outside the ship, and
played like monkeys on the outer skin! They dangled
from the spinning hull, swinging from handhold to
handhold with their feet dangling over an infinite
abyssЧone slip, and we would have lost one, if not
both, of our pilots. Probably if one had gone, the
other would have been unable to contemplate living
and would have followed the first loyally to a horrible