"Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

deed was talked about at dinner.
Most of Arkady's problem runs ended in failure, however, meaning
death for all. Simulated or not, it was hard not to be sobered by these
experiences, and after that, irritated with Arkady for inventing them. One
time they repaired every monitor in the bridge just in time to see the
screens register a hit by a small asteroid, which sheared through the hub
and killed them all. Another time Arkady, as part of the navigation team,
made an "error" and instructed the computers to increase the ship's spin
rather than decrease it. "Pinned to the floor by six gs!" he cried in mock
horror, and they had to crawl on the floor for half an hour, pretending to
rectify the error while weighing half a ton each. When they succeeded,
Arkady leaped off the floor and began pushing them away from the control
monitor. "What the hell are you doing?" Maya yelled.
"He's gone crazy," Janet said.
"He's simulated going crazy," Nadia corrected her. "We have to
figure out—" doing an end run around Arkady "—how to deal with
someone on the bridge going insane!"
Which no doubt was true. But they could see the whites of Arkady's
eyes all the way around, and there wasn't a trace of recognition in him as
he silently assaulted them; it took all five of them to restrain him, and Janet
and Phyllis Boyle were hurt by his sharp elbows.
"Well?" he said at dinner afterward, grinning lopsidedly, as he was
growing a fat lip. "What if it happens? We're under pressure up here, and
the approach will be worst of all. What if someone cracks?" He turned to
Russell and the grin grew wider. "What are the chances of that, eh?" And
he began to sing a Jamaican song, in a Slavic Carribean accent: "'Pressure
drop, oh pressure drop, oh-o, pressure going to drop on you-oo-oo!'"
So they kept trying, handling the problem runs as seriously as they
could, even the attack by Martian natives or the decoupling of Torus H
caused by "explosive bolts installed by mistake when the ship was built,"
or the last minute veering of Phobos out of its orbit. Dealing with the
more implausible scenarios sometimes took on a kind of surreal black
humor, and Arkady replayed some of his videotapes as after-dinner
entertainment, which sometimes got people launched into the air with
laughter.
But the plausible problem runs. . . . They kept on coming, morning
after morning. And despite the solutions, despite the protocols for finding
solutions, there was that sight, time after time: the red planet rushing at
them at an unimaginable forty thousand kilometers an hour, until it filled
the screen and the screen went white, and small black letters appeared on
it: Collision.
# # #
They were traveling to Mars in a Type II Hohmann Ellipse, a slow but
efficient course, chosen from among other alternatives mainly because the
two planets were in the correct position for it when the ship was finally
ready, with Mars about forty-five degrees ahead of Earth in the plane of the
ecliptic. During the voyage they would travel just over halfway around the
Sun, making their rendezvous with Mars some three hundred days later.
Their womb time, as Hiroko called it.
The psychologists back home had judged it worthwhile to alter things