"Robert A. Heinlein - A tenderfoot in space (original version)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

big city. Since then I’ve been in
space. No dogs.”
“Darn it, Slim!—you’re being evasive: You know about sleep-
freeze. I know you do.”
Slim sighed. “Kid, you’re going to die someday and so am I. And so is
your pup. It’s the one thing we can’t avoid. Why, the ship’s reactor
could blow up and nOne of us would know what hit us till they started


17
fitting us with haloes. So why fret about whether your dog comes out
of sleep-freeze? Either he does and you’ve worried unnecessarily. . .
or he doesn’t and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“So you don’t think he will?”
“I didn’t say that. I said it was foolish to worry.”
But Charlie did worry; the talk with Slim brought it to the top of his
mind, worried him more and more as the day got closer. The last
month seemed longer to him than the four dreary months that had
preceded it. -
As for Nixie, time meant nothing to him. Suspended between life and
death, he was not truly in the Hesperus at all; bu1~ somewhere el-se,
outside of time. It was merely his shaggy little carcass that lay, stored
like a ham, in the frozen hold of the ship.
Eventually the Captain slowed his ship, matched her with Venus and
set her in a - parking orbit alongside Venus’s single satellite station.
After transshipment and maddening delay the Vaughns were taken
down in the winged shuttle Cupid into the clouds of Venus and
landed at the north pole colony, Borealis.
For Charlie there was a still more maddening delay: cargo (which
included Nixie) was unloaded after passengers and took many days
because the mighty Hesperus held so much more than the little
Cupid. He could not even go over to the freight sheds to inquire about
Nixie as immigrants were held at the reception center for quarantine.
Each one had received many shots during the five-month trip to
innoculate them against the hazards of Venus; now they found that
they must wait not only on most careful physical examination and
observation to make sure that they were not bringing Earth diseases
in with them but also to receive more shots not available aboard ship.
Charlie spent the days with sore arms and gnawing anxiety.
So far he had had one glimpse outdoors—a permanently cloudy sky
which never got dark and was never very bright. Borealis is at
Venus’s north pole and the axis of the planet is nearly erect; the
unseen Sun circled the horizon, never rising nor setting by more than
a few degrees. The colony lived in eternal twilight.
The lessened gravity, nine-tenths that of Earth, Charlie did not notice
even though he knew he should. It had