"Murray Leinster - Proxima Centauri" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

burning in emptiness.
There was no change in her outer appearance. There had been none to
speak of in years. At long, infrequent intervals men had emerged from air
locks and moved about her sides, bathing the steel they walked on and
themselves alike with fierce glares from heat lamps lest the cold of her
plating transmit itself through the material of the suits and kill the men
like ants on red-hot metal. But for a long time no such expedition had been
needed.
Only now, in the distant faint light of Proxima Centauri, a man in a
space suit emerged from such a tiny lock. Instantly he shot out to the end of
a threadlike life line. The constant deceleration of the ship not only
simulated gravity within. Anything partaking of its motion showed the same
effect. The man upon its decelerating forward side was flung away from the
ship by his own momentum, the same force which, within it, had pressed his
feet against the floors.
He hauled himself back laboriously, moving with an exaggerated
clumsiness in his bloated space suit. He clung to handholds and hooked himself
in place, while he worked an electric drill. He moved still more clumsily to
another place and drilled again. A third, and fourth, and fifth. For half an
hour or more, then, he labored to set up on the vast steel surface, which
seemed always above him, ah intricate array of wires and framework. In the end
he seemed content. He hauled himself back to the air lock and climbed within.
The Adastra hurtled onward, utterly unchanged save for a very tiny
fretwork of wire, perhaps thirty feet across, which looked more like a
microscopic barbed-wire entanglement than anything else.
Within the Adastra, Helen Bradley greeted Jack warmly as he got out of
his space suit.
“It was horrible!” she told him, “to see you dangling like that! With
millions of miles of empty space below you!”
“If my line had parted,” said Jack quietly, “your father’d have turned
the ship and caught up to me. Let’s go turn on the inductor and see how the
new reception grid works.”
He hung ~up the space suit. As they turned to go through the doorway
their hands touched accidentally. They looked at each other and faltered. They
stopped, Helen’s eyes shining. They unconsciously swayed toward each other.
Jack’s hands lifted hungrily.
Footsteps sounded close by. Aistair, second in cornmand of the space
ship, rounded a corner and stopped short.
“What’s this?” he demanded savagely. “Just because the commander’s
brought you into officers’ quarters, Gary, it doesn’t follow that your Mut
methods of romance can come, too!”
“You dare!” cried Helen furiously.
 Jack, from a hot dull flush, was swiftly paling to the dead-white of
rage.
“You’ll take that back,” he said very quietly indeed, “or I’ll show you
Mut methods of fighting with a force gun! As an officer, I carry one, too,
now!” Alstair snarled at him.
“Your father’s been taken ill,” he told Helen angrily. “He feels the
voyage is about over. Anticipation has kept up his strength for months past,
but now he’s—”