"Robert A. Heinlein - Between Planets" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

acceleration grew worse; he blacked out.
He came to as the ship went into free flight, arching in a high parabola over
the plains. At once he felt great relief no longer to have unbearable weight
racking his rib cage, straining his heart, turning his muscles to water-but,
before he could enjoy the blessed relief, he was aware of a new sensation; his
stomach was trying to crawl up his gullet.
At first he was alarmed, being unable to account for the unexpected and
unbearably unpleasant sensation. Then he had a sudden wild suspicion could it?
Oh, no! It couldn't be...not space sickness, not to him. Why, he had been born
in free fall; space nausea was for Earth crawlers, groundhogs!
But the suspicion grew to certainty; years of easy living on a planet had worn
out his immunity. With secret embarrassment he conceded that he certainly was
acting like a groundhog. It had not occurred to him to ask for an antinausea
shot before blast-off, though he had walked past the counter plainly marked
with a red cross.
Shortly his secret embarrassment became public; he had barely time to get at
the plastic container provided for the purpose. Thereafter he felt better,
although weak, and listened half-heartedly to the canned description coming
out of the loudspeaker of the country over which they were falling. Presently,
near Kansas City, the sky turned from black back to purple again, the air
foils took hold, and the passengers again felt weight as the rocket continued
glider fashion on a long, screaming approach to New Chicago. Don folded his
couch into a chair and sat up.
Twenty minutes later, as the field came up to meet them, rocket units in the
nose were triggered by radar and the Santa F6 Trail braked to a landing. The
entire trip had taken less time than the copter jaunt from the school to
Alburquerque -- something less than an hour for the same route eastward that
the covered wagons had made westward in eighty days, with luck. The local
rocket landed on a field just outside the city, next door to the enormous
field, still slightly radioactive, which was both the main spaceport of the
planet and the former site of Old Chicago.
Don hung back and let a Navajo family disembark ahead of him, then followed
the squaw out. A movable slideway had crawled out to the ship; he stepped on
it and let it carry him into the station. Once inside he was confused by the
bustling size of the place, level after level, above and below ground. Gary
Station served not merely the Santa Fe Trail, the Route 66, and other local
rockets shuttling to the Southwest; it served a dozen other local lines, as
well as ocean hoppers, freight tubes, and space ships operating between Earth
and Circum-Terra Station-and thence to Luna, Venus, Mars, and the Jovian
moons; it was the spinal cord of a more-than-world-wide empire.
Tuned as he was to the wide and empty New Mexico desert and, before that, to
the wider wastes of space, Don felt oppressed and irritated by the noisy
swarming mass. He felt the loss of dignity that comes from men behaving like
ants, even though his feeling was not thought out in words. Still, it had to
be faced-he spotted the triple globes of Interplanet Lines and followed
glowing arrows to its reservation office.
An uninterested clerk assured him that the office had no record of his
reservation in the Valkyrie. Patiently Don explained that the reservation had
been made from Mars and displayed the radiogram from his parents. Annoyed into
activity the clerk finally consented to phone Circum-Terra; the satellite