"Robert A. Heinlein - Starman Jones" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

20. "--A Ship Is Not Just Steel--"
21. The Captain of the _Asgard_
22. The _Tomahawk_
STARMAN JONES




1

THE TOMAHAWK



Max liked this time of day, this time of year. With the crops in, he
could finish his evening chores early and be lazy. When he had slopped the
hogs and fed the chickens, instead of getting supper he followed a path to a
rise west of the barn and lay down in the grass, unmindful of chiggers. He had
a book with him that he had drawn from the county library last Saturday,
Bonforte's _Sky Beasts: A Guide to Exotic Zoology_, but he tucked it under his
head as a pillow. A blue jay made remarks about his honesty, then shut up when
he failed to move. A red squirrel sat on a stump and stared at him, then went
on burying nuts.
Max kept his eyes to the northwest. He favored this spot because from it
he could see the steel stilts and guide rings of the Chicago, Springfield, &
Earthport Ring Road emerge from a slash in the ridge to his right. There was a
guide ring at the mouth of the cut, a great steel hoop twenty feet high. A
pair of stilt-like tripods supported another ring a hundred feet out from the
cut. A third and last ring, its stilts more than a hundred feet high to keep
it level with the others, lay west of him where the ground dropped still more
sharply into the valley below. Half way up it he could see the power-link
antenna pointing across the gap.
On his left the guides of the C.S.&E. picked up again on the far side of
the gap. The entering ring was larger to allow for maximum windage deviation;
on its stilts was the receptor antenna for the power link. That ridge was
steeper; there was only one more ring before the road disappeared into a
tunnel. He had read that, on the Moon, entrance rings were no larger than
pass-along rings, since there was never any wind to cause variation in
ballistic. When he was a child this entrance ring had been slightly smaller
and, during an unprecedented windstorm, a train had struck the ring and
produced an unbelievable wreck, with more than four hundred people killed. He
had not seen it and his father had not allowed him to poke around afterwards
because of the carnage, but the scar of it could still be seen on the lefthand
ridge, a darker green than the rest.
He watched the trains go by whenever possible, not wishing the
passengers any bad luck--but still, if there should happen to be a
catastrophe, he didn't want to miss it.
Max kept his eyes fixed on the cut; the _Tomahawk_ was due any instant.
Suddenly there was a silver gleam, a shining cylinder with needle nose burst
out of the cut, flashed through the last ring and for a breathless moment was