Creature of unknown kind - страница 7

1. Missions with Petrovich aren't worth it. They almost draw lots.” For weeks the trackers had been talking among themselves, the rumor penetrated even in the “geese house”, and Vadim knows it, that Senior Ensign Petrovich now goes for terrifying tracks, not around the “neutral” but in the most unknown steppe; beats the wedges in the Zone, in those places where regular three kilometers on a map objectively had became thirty kilometers long time ago. In the most direct meaning – thirty, stretched “by the anomalous intensities of unknown kind near the surface of the planet Earth”.

“The last thing I need is the ability to read thoughts”, Vadim thought with unsighted anger. Now what? They have three complete poles, “connecting ones”: Vadim carried them in the backpack's loop, like swords in a movie with Bruce Lee. Another one, broken, was used by Petrovich instead of a cane (“Instead of a staff!”).

Petrovich silently returned to the middle of the distance between Bashkalo and Vadim. Pulled out the cane-staff.

– Sverzhin, go to the three hundred and twenty-fourth, – he ordered in his usual voice. – Take the next pole on the right, in three meters, and there stop on command. Forward, march.

Vadim took the pole in his right hand after ten minutes. It was sticking out askew, strongly rotated edge-on to their route. Vadim waited for the command, turned to his superior and fell on his knee feeling sweat between stocking of the hazmat suit and breeches. It was hot. Petrovich walked around the pole, made a “spiral” in two turns from it, “inspecting” the air, its density and humidity with his hands, then said pointing to the chosen place:

– Here we rest, have lunch and a smoke break. Bashkalo with me. Sverzhin stay where you are. Watch quietly, as it's done. If you smoke – smoke.

Bashkalo went to the specified place, both with Petrovich they knelt, facing each other, took off their backpacks and began to built the dastarkhan112. A couple of minutes later Petrovich, extending an arm to Vadim, snapped his fingers. Vadim took off and gave him his own backpack. He carried the bulk of the group's rations. He laid his poles next to the Senior Ensign's pole-cane. The Ensigns assembled lunch quickly, observing dozens of a strange little rules, almost imperceptible to the inexperienced eye. Vadim remembered (without any Mumbler) as the association was obvious, the words of cosmonaut Makarov. In the spring of eighty-two his father had another exacerbation (the penultimate one, he did not survive the next one), and Vadim was sent to stay with his mother in Sverdlovsk, accompanied by a special officer. And almost immediately, literally a couple of days after the delivery, in her filthy children's regional library his mother had a pioneer meeting with cosmonaut Makarov, who had come, the hell knows why, for some seminar, perhaps, or a congress. There also was the writer Strugatsky, a huge old man, next to whom the cosmonaut in an incredible leather jacket looked like a Lilliputian from a cartoon. But Vadim did not care about the writer, whereas the cosmonaut interested him, no matter how bad it felt inside, no matter how Vadim's heartache, despair and hatred were strangling him. This was the cosmonaut, after all… So, among all the different things, cosmonaut Makarov equally surprised the ragtag of pioneers in caps and stockings, as well as Vadim in his yellow jumpsuit and sneakers, when he said that the weightlessness is pretty disgusting and he, cosmonaut Makarov, did not like it; and then he said that many years of training before starting can not give as much useful knowledge as a five-minute observation of actions of comrades who were already flying, after launch. And he illustrated this with a scene of going to sleep in the living compartment of the “Soyuz” spacecraft. What kind of tricks there are, unexplainable on Earth. Indeed, the way Petrovich and Bashkalo were making fire, the precautions and tricks with which they were opening and heating the stew, there, outside, you can hardly explain to anybody on Earth.