"Chapter 02" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gordon Dickson - Forever Man)

CHAPTER

2
THEY WENT OUT TOGETHER INTO THE CORRIDOR AND ALONG IT
and down an elevator tube to a tunnel with a moving floorway.
They stepped onto the gently rolling strip, which carried them
forward onto a slightly faster strip, and then to a faster, and so
Fon until they were flashing down the tunnel surrounded by air
pumped at a hundred and twenty miles an hour in the same
direction they traveled, so that they would not he blown off
their feet. In a few minutes they came to the end, and air and
strips decelerated so that they slowed and stepped at last into
what looked like an ordinary office, but which was deep in the
heart of a mountain. -This, the memory returned to Jim, in
case the Transmission Section blew up on one of its attempts
to transmit. The statistical chance was always there. Perhaps,
this time...?
Mollen had cleared them with the officer of the duty guard
~and they were moving on through other rooms to the suiting
room, where Jim and Mary climbed into the unbelievably bar-
rel-bodied space suits that were actually small spaceships in
~themselves and in which-if they who wore them were un-
and still would not take their x-pills-they might drift
in space, living on recycled air and nourishments until they
went mad, or died of natural causes.

--Or were found and brought back. The one-in-a-million
claance. Jim, now fully inside his suit, locked it closed.
"All set?" It was Mollen's voice coming at him over the
aud circuit of the suit. Through the transparent window of the
headpiece he saw the older man watching him.
"All set, General." He looked over at Mary and saw her
already suited and waiting. For a moment it struck Jim that
she might have been trying to suit up fast to show she was
something more than a weekend warrior, and he felt a tinge of
sympathy toward her. With the putting on of his own suit, the
old feeling of sureness had begun to flow back into him, and
he felt released. "Let's go, Ca-lain."
"Stick with -'Mary,"' she said, "and I'll stick with
'Jim.'"
"Good luck," said Mollen. Together, Jim and Mary
clumped across the room, waited for the tons-heavy explosion
door to swing open, then clumped through.
On the floor of the vast cavern that was the takeoff area,
five two-man ships sat like gray-white darts, waiting. Red
"manned" lights glowed by each sealed pon on the first four
they passed. Jim read their names as he stumped on forward
toward the open port of the lead ship, his ship, the AndFriend.
The other four ships were the Swallow, the Fair Maid. the