"Heinlein, Robert A - Have Space Suit Will Travel (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

"Huh? You don't know? You don't know about Daddy's Nobel Prize? Or anything?"
"I'm just a country boy, Peewee. Sorry."
"You must be. Daddy doesn't teach anything. He thinks. He thinks better than anybody... except me, possibly. He's the synthesist. Everybody else specializes. Daddy knows everything and puts the pieces together."
Maybe so, but I hadn't heard of him. It sounded like a good idea... but it would take an awfully smart man-if I had found out anything, it was that they could print it faster than I could study it. Professor Reisfeld must have three heads. Five.
"Wait till you meet him," she added, glancing at her watch. "Kip, I think we had better get braced. We'll be landing in a few minutes... and he won't care how he shakes up passengers."
So we crowded into the narrow end and braced each other. We waited. After a bit the ship shook itself and the floor tilted. There was a slight bump and things got steady and suddenly I felt very light. Peewee pulled her feet under her and stood up. "Well, we're on the Moon."




Chapter 5

When I was a kid, we used to pretend we were making the first landing on the Moon. Then I gave up romantic notions and realized that I would have to go about it another way. But I never thought I would get there penned up, unable to see out, like a mouse in a shoe box.
The only thing that proved I was on the Moon was my weight. High gravity can be managed anywhere, with centrifuges. Low gravity is another matter; on Earth the most you can squeeze out is a few seconds going off a high board, or by parachute delay, or stunts in a plane.
If low gravity goes on and on, then wherever you are, you are not on Earth. Well, I wasn't on Mars; it had to be the Moon.
On the Moon I should weigh a little over twenty-five pounds. It felt about so-I felt light enough to walk on a lawn and not bend the grass.
For a few minutes I simply exulted in it, forgetting him and the trouble we were in, just heel-and-toe around the room, getting the wonderful feel of it, bouncing a little and bumping my head against the ceiling and feeling how slowly, slowly, slowly I settled back to the floor. Peewee sat down, shrugged her shoulders and gave a little smile, an annoyingly patronizing one. The "Old Moon-Hand"-all of two weeks more of it than I had had.
Low gravity has its disconcerting tricks. Your feet have hardly any traction and they fly out from under you. I had to learn with muscles and reflexes what I had known only intellectually: that when weight goes down, mass and inertia do not. To change direction, even in walking, you have to lean the way you would to round a turn on a board track- and even then if you don't have traction (which I didn't in socks on a smooth floor) your feet go out from under you.
A fall doesn't hurt much in one-sixth gravity but Peewee giggled. I sat up and said, "Go and laugh, smartie. You can afford to-you've got tennis shoes."
"I'm sorry. But you looked silly, hanging there like a slow-motion picture and grabbing air."
"No doubt. Very funny."
"I said I was sorry. Look, you can borrow my shoes."
I looked at her feet, then at mine, and snorted. "Gee, thanks!"
"Well... you could cut the heels out, or something. It wouldn't bother me. Nothing ever does. Where are your shoes. Kip?"
"Uh, about a quarter-million miles away-unless we got off at the wrong stop."
"Oh. Well, you won't need them much, here."
"Yeah." I chewed my lip, thinking about "here" and no longer interested in games with gravity. "Peewee? What do we do now?"
"About what?"
"About him."
"Nothing. What can we do?"
"Then what do we do?"
"Sleep."
"Huh?"
"Sleep. 'Sleep, that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care.' 'Tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep.' 'Blessings on him who invented sleep, the mantle that covers all human thoughts.' "
"Quit showing off and talk sense!"
"I am talking sense. At the moment we're as helpless as goldfish. We're simply trying to survive-and the first principle of survival is not to worry about the impossible and concentrate on what's possible. I'm hungry and thirsty and uncomfortable and very, very tired... and all I can do about it is sleep. So if you will kindly keep quiet, that's what I'll do."
"I can take a hint. No need to snap at me."
"I'm sorry. But I get cross as two sticks when I'm tired and Daddy says I'm simply frightful before breakfast." She curled up in a little ball and tucked that filthy rag doll under her chin. "G'night, Kip."
"Good night, Peewee."
I thought of something and started to speak... and saw that she was asleep. She was breathing softly and her face had smoothed out and no longer looked alert and smart-alecky. Her upper lip pooched out in a baby pout and she looked like a dirty-faced cherub. There were streaks where she had apparently cried and not wiped it away. But she had never let me see her crying.
Kip, I said to myself, you get yourself into the darndest things; this is much worse than bringing home a stray pup or a kitten.
But I had to take care of her ... or die trying.
Well, maybe I would. Die trying, I mean. It didn't look as if I were any great shakes even taking care of myself.
I yawned, then yawned again. Maybe the shrimp had more sense than I had, at that. I was more tired than I had ever been, and hungry and thirsty and not comfortable other ways. I thought about banging on the door panel and trying to attract the fat one or his skinny partner. But that would wake Peewee-and it might antagonize him.
So I sprawled on my back the way I nap on the living-room rug at home. I found that a hard floor does not require any one sleeping position on the Moon; one-sixth gravity is a better mattress than all the foam rubber ever made-that fussy princess in Hans Christian Andersen's story would have had no complaints.
I want to sleep at once.
It was the wildest space opera I had ever seen, loaded with dragons and Arcturian maidens and knights in shining space armor and shuttling between King Arthur's Court and the Dead Sea Bottoms of Barsoom. I didn't mind that but I did mind the announcer. He had the voice of Ace Quiggle and the face of him. He leaned out of the screen and leered, those wormy cilia writhing. "Will Beowulf conquer the Dragon? Will Tristan return to Iseult? Will Peewee find her dolly? Tune in this channel tomorrow night and in the meantime, wake up and hurry to your neighborhood druggist for a cake of Skyway's Kwikbrite Armor Polish, the better polish used by the better knights sans peur et sans reproche. Wake up!" He shoved a snaky arm out of the screen and grabbed my shoulder.
I woke up.
"Wake up," Peewee was saying, shaking my shoulder. "Please wake up, Kip."
"Lea' me alone!"