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