"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Hell on Earth (english)" - читать интересную книгу автора

magnifying glass, and a paper punch.
"Enough for now," said Arlene. "I'm sure the
thingamabob will show up before we finish. We'd
better get started ... I have no idea how fast the air is
leaking from the dome; we might have a month, we
might have a couple of days!"
I wasn't going to argue with an optimistic Arlene.
Hell, I hardly ever argued with the pessimistic one.
"We haven't looked under all the tarps," I said, "and
there are other rooms to check too. But there is one
more shopping expedition required before we start
work. We need enough food and water to hold us
through the job; and all the spare liquid oxygen tanks
and hydrogen tanks we can find."
Arlene nodded. We were in a race with a bunch of
air molecules, and they had a head start. In addition
to oxygen for fuel, we actually needed to breathe now
and again over the next few days. Weeks, whatever. It
would be cruel fate indeed if I screwed the last bolt
and hammered the final wing nut, only to keel over
from oxygen deprivation.
My brain was working overtime now: "The pres-
sure is dropping so slowly, we're not going to notice
when it gets dangerous. Can you rig up something to
warn us when to start taking a hit of pure oxygen?"
"And regulate how much we should take. Yeah, it's
a space station ... I don't think I'll have much trou-
ble finding an air-pressure sensor and rebreather kit."
She pulled a gouge pad out of her shirt pocket and
started taking notes. She thought of something I'd
missed: "I'll look for warm clothes too, Fly. The
temperature will drop as we lose pressure."
"Won't the sun warm us? We're no farther away
than Earth itself."
"We're underground. All this dirt makes a great
insulator, unfortunately."
First day, we were good scouts, gathering supplies
for our merit badge in survival. I regretted that we
couldn't move what we needed to a lower level and
seal off one compartment. That would stretch survival
by another month. But hauling the tons of material
we'd need to build a rocket was impossible.
Arlene scrounged a generous supply of food, most
of it produced under the dome with considerable help
from the Genetics Department. After watching the
monsters produced assembly-line out of the vat, I
hesitated even to eat our own—human experiments
in recombinant-DNA veggies and lab-grown "Meet."
But Arlene wasn't queasy. She preferred the Deimos-
grown peas and carrots to the real delicacy, frozen