"Murray Leinster - Space Tug" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

It was not exactly pain. It was a feeling as if a completely unbearable pressure pushed at him. Not only on
the outside, like a blow, but inside too, like nothing else imaginable. Not only his chest pressed upon his
lungs, but his lungs strained toward his backbone. And not only the flesh of his thighs tugged to flatten
against his acceleration chair, but the blood in his veins tried to flow exclusively away from the front part
of his body—and his brain.
This acceleration seemed to endure for centuries. Actually, it lasted under a full minute. In that time it
increased the speed of the ship by rather more than a mile per second. Which, of course, was not nearly
enough, not much more than four thousand miles per hour. The supply ship would need very, very much
more than that to get out to the Platform's orbit. But it did arrive at that speed without expending an ounce
of the fuel in its own rockets, and it had gotten all the way up through the belt of thick atmosphere which
offered resistance to its traveling.
The jato thrust ended with wild variations of the ship's straining as the separate jatos burned out unevenly.
Joe gasped, but he could allow himself only a shake of the head to try to clear his brain. The irregular,
violent thump-ings as the jatos burned out almost exactly cancelled each other out. He jammed down the
ship's own takeoff rocket control There was a monstrous noise and a mighty surging.
"Clear of cage," Haney panted.
And then they were pressed fiercely against their acceleration chairs again. The ship was no longer in its
launching cage. It was no longer held up by pushpots. It was free, with its takeoff rockets naming. It
plunged on up and out. But the acceleration was less. Nobody can stand too much gravity too long. But by
comparison with the jato boost, the three-gravity acceleration of the ship's own rockets was mild.
Joe's body resisted movement with a weight of four hundred fifty pounds instead of a third as much,
aground. His heart had to pump against three times the normal "head" of liquid. His chest felt as if he had
a leaden weight on it. His tongue still tried to crowd itself back into his throat and strangle him. But the
sensation was only nightmarish. It was possible to move and possible to see. One could breathe, with
difficulty, and by titanic effort one could speak. But it was still far from pleasant.
Joe managed to keep his eyes focused. The dials of the instruments said that everything was all right. The
tinny voice behind his head, its timber changed by the weight of its diaphragm, said, "All readings check!
Good work.'"
Joe moved his eyes to a quartz view port. The sky was black. But there were stars. At the same instant he
saw white disks of sunshine entering through the ports. Stars and sunshine together. And the sunshine was
that of space. Even with the polarizers cutting down the glare it was unbearably bright and hot beyond
conception. He smelled overheated paint where the sunlight smote on a metal bulkhead. Stars and
superhot sunshine together....
It was necessary to pant for breath, and his heart pounded horribly and his eyes tried to go out of focus,
but Joe strained in his acceleration chair and managed to laugh a little.
"We did it!" he panted. "In case you didn't notice, we're out of atmosphere. We're out in space."



2
THE PRESSURE of three gravities acceleration continued, and Joe had work to do in spite of it. The takeoff
rockets were solid fuel jobs, like those which launched the Platform. That meant that they had some very
desirable qualities, but there were some drawbacks. One was that a ship accelerating with multiple solid-
fuel propelling rockets needed to be manually controlled. A robot couldn't take care of the situation. But
the advantages were enough to overbalance that difficulty.
The little ship's rockets were wire-wound steel tubes lined with a very special refractory, with unstable
beryllium and fluorine compounds to burn. The solid fuel burned at so many inches per second. The
refractory crumbled away and was hurled astern at a corresponding rate—save for one small point. Some
parts of it crumbled at a carefully arranged different rate, leaving a pattern of baffles which acted like a
maxim silencer on a rifle, or like an automobile muffler. The baffles set up eddies in the gas stream and