"Blish, James - Tomb Tapper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

oil."
"All right. Doesn't look like she needs much gas."
"Don't you ever stop talkin'? Let's move."
McDonough lowered his load to the cold floor beside the
plane's cabin, feeling a brief flash of resentment. In daily
life Martinson was a job printer who couldn't, and didn't,
give orders to anybody, not even his wife. Well, those were
usually the boys who let rank go to their heads, even in a
volunteer outfit. He got to work.
Voices sounded from the shack, and then Andy Persons,
the commanding officer, came bounding over the sill, followed
by two sleepy-eyed cadets. "What's up?" he shouted. "That
you, Martinson?"
"It's me. One of you cadets, pass me up that can. Andy,
get the doors open, hey? "There's a Russki bomber down north
of us, somewhere near Howells. Part of a flight that was
making a run on Schenectady."
"Did they get it?"
"No, they overshot, way overtook out Kingston instead.
Stewart Field hit them just as they turned to regroup, and
knocked this baby down on the first pass. We're supposed
The rest of the adjutant's reply was lost in a growing,
echoing roar, as though they were all standing underneath a
vast trestle over which all the railroad trains in the world
were crossing at once. The sixty-four-foot organ reeds of jets
were being blown in the night zenith above the fieldanother
hunting pack, come from Stewart Field to avenge the hydro-
gen agony that had been Kingston.
His head still inside the plane's greenhouse, McDonough
listened transfixed. Like most CAP officers, he was too old to
be a jet pilot, his reflexes too slow, his eyesight too far over
the line, his belly muscles too soft to take the five-gravity
turns; but now and then he thought about what it might be
like to ride one of those flying blowtorches, cruising at six
hundred miles an hour before a thin black wake of kerosene
fumes, or being followed along the ground at top speed by
the double wave-front of the "supersonic bang." It was a
noble notion, almost as fine as that of piloting the one-man
Niagara of power that was a rocket fighter.
The noise grew until it seemed certain that the invisible
Jets were going to bullet directly through the hangar, and
then dimmed gradually.
"The usual orders?" Persons shouted up from under the
declining roar. "Find the plane, pump the live survivors, pick
the corpses' brains? Who else is up?"
"Nobody," Martinson said, coming down from the ladder
and hauling it clear of the plane. "Middletown squadron's
deactivated; Montgomery hasn't got a plane; Newburgh hasn't
got a field."
"Warwick has Group's L-16"