Children in Space (eBook)

Anatoly Moshkovsky (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
175 Seiten
Readers Union / The Science Fiction Book Club (Verlag)
978-0-00-095649-1 (ISBN)

Infos

''Five in the Spaceship' is the most popular story by children's writer Anatoly Moshkovsky and one of the best works of Soviet children's science fiction, which remains captivating for a new generation of readers. Five kids hijack a spaceship and set off to distant, uncharted worlds. They are in for incredibly interesting adventures and challenges!' is the most popular story by children's writer Anatoly Moshkovsky and one of the best works of Soviet children's science fiction, which remains captivating for a new generation of readers. Five kids hijack a spaceship and set off to distant, uncharted worlds. They are in for incredibly interesting adventures and challenges!

Textauszug

Tolya stood there with a furrowed brow.
      Everything was in vain... Everything!
      The father didn't care that he had been preparing for this conversation for an entire month.
      On that day, before his father's arrival, Tolya sat in his room, contemplating for the last time how best to start the conversation. The walls were adorned with the colorful faces of inhabitants from other planets, painted by his friend Alik: long, wide, and round, with one, two, and even ten eyes; purple vines hung from the ceiling, with fiery red shells and stuffed specimens of unseen birds with outstretched wings attached to them; blue, golden, and black alien stones lay against the walls, large but so light that you could easily toss them across the room with a snap; on the shelves stood books with very thin paper — over a thousand pages in each! — and a small arrow on the book binding: turn it, and the pages would flip themselves at the speed you desired. His father brought all of this from space missions and gave it to Tolya, who, since he learned to walk, had been dreaming of other worlds - dazzling, unknown, wondrous ones.
      So Tolya was standing in the big office, and his father kept repeating,
      "You can't, son... Don't you know that the rules strictly forbid children under seventeen from flying beyond the Solar System?
      "But why, Dad? Can you tell me why?"
      "As if you don't know yourself, don't read newspapers, don't listen to the radio, don't go to school where..."
      "I'm listening! I understand! I'm learning! That's why I know this ban is outdated... Maybe I should show you the book 'Scientific Discoveries Made by Children in the Last Three Years' again?"
      "No need..."

Tolya's father was a famous scientist, the author of many books, and the vice-president of the Academy of Lepidoptera. He had been so fascinated by his butterflies since childhood that he never parted with his folding net and even studied them at home. The rarest butterflies, known on Earth in only two or three specimens, adorned transparent boxes hanging on the walls of his father's study. Nature whimsically painted them, and the father always proudly showed them to guests. In the cabinets and on the shelves of his study, there were boxes with tens of thousands of butterflies from Earth and various planets where Earthlings had been; here, too, were hundreds of books in different languages of the Universe, all dedicated to the same butterflies. It seemed the father could not spend a day or even an hour without them!
Even now he was answering Tolya while simultaneously peering through the eyepiece of a small electron microscope to get a better look at the serrated wing of a butterfly with an extraordinarily bright purple coloration. Meanwhile, Tolya, pale, as if frozen, with large ears and shining eyes, stood by the table and looked at his father.
      "Tolya," said the father, "you can't do that! Well, do you want me to put you on the spaceship that leaves for the Moon tomorrow at seven fifteen?"
      "I don't want to fly to the Moon! I've been there ten times! I know every rock and circus by heart! Soon they'll be opening kindergartens there and inventing spacesuits for infants... Even our Zhora was there..."
      "You should have set out to Mars with Seryozha Dubov and his father. They invited you, after all."
      "I don't want to set out to Mars! I want to leave for the ultra-far..."
      "I've already answered you. As if it's boring on Mars or even here... Oh, son, son!"
      "Dad…"
      "I am just finishing up now, son... Everything has its time. Don't rush, nothing will slip away from you. There is still so much undiscovered and mysterious on our Earth... I'm sure your Andryusha Uvarov isn't just sitting idly in the archaeologists' camp; you know, they've already excavated half of the Inca city; they say it has almost completely survived. You could have gone with Andryusha and his brother. And the Crystal City didn't interest you, even though it's right in the center of Antarctica... Well, admit it, how many radiograms did you get from Petya Koltsov inviting you to fly over, at least for a week?"

"Ten," Tolya said gloomily.
      "See! All your friends have gone off on vacation, and you… Tolya, well, at least catch me some butterflies here, on Earth. Catch them! It's so important…"
      "I'll catch you a billion butterflies, but not here, over there, only…"
      "You can't, son," the father repeated and sighed. "And don't beg, don't insist, learn to be patient... I'm asking you."
      "But even you fly to the farthest planets for your insects..."
      "That's right, I am sent there on missions, and I also fly there at the request of these planets as a consultant. But there are laws of Higher Discipline, Higher Conscience, and Higher Patience that apply to me as well, and there are planets where, for various reasons beyond my control, I am forbidden to fly too. Though I am an adult. But I cannot violate the clause about children in the 'Interstellar Flight Instructions.' Kind and wise people wrote it…
      "But why do they forget that children…"
      "Tolya!.." the father, exhausted, leaned back in the armchair. "What kind of character do you have? You don’t know what it's like, a flight there…"
      "I can imagine! I'm not afraid of anything! Dad, forgive me, but you… You are overly cautious! Overly…"
      "Well, in that case, you're super brave, super strange, super boy!" The father stood up from the table, laughed, and tugged at his ear. "You are eager to fly super far, but have you learned to dive twenty meters? Have you read all five thousand pages of the "Book of Oceans"? Can you count the freckles on your own nose?"

Tolya ran out of the office.

These freckles again! These taunts about the depth of his knowledge... Tolya rushed to his mother - she had already returned from her Cloud Academy, where she had been studying the problems of towing clouds to the arid regions of the Earth... But then he immediately jumped back from the door: his mother was also against his flight to the super... - ah, this damned "super" again! - ... distant planets. And his brother, also a scientist, who dedicated his life to the lives of crabs, did not support Tolya. And his sister, who has written poetry...

Tolya rushed out of the apartment, pressed the green button glowing on the blackboard, and the elevator immediately rushed silently to him. Tolya entered the cabin. What is it then? He, Tolya, strives for the unusual, the mysterious and the sublime, and for them this...

Tolya sniffed, held back his tears, and stepped out of the elevator. He went out into the wide, sunny courtyard. Here plane trees grew and roses bloomed - scarlet, white, yellow. By one tree Zhora stood, nicknamed Glutton for his unheard-of, for his downright terrifying appetite. In addition, he was a merry fellow and an inveterate slacker. The Sapphire district held no other boy like him, and, as Tolya’s first friend, Seryozha Dubov (now on Mars), assured everyone, large excursions would soon visit their yard, letting everyone know that boys still existed who could sit sprawled on a bench for hours, do nothing, and eat so much.

However, now Zhora wasn't being idle or eating. He was sniffing a rose and looking at the same time at the window, behind which… Of course, he could not look at any other window! He could only look at the window behind which Lenochka lived…

Here Tolya should have quickened his pace so that Glutton wouldn't notice him, but Tolya was walking slowly, and at the yellow booth with two robot janitors that swept and watered the yard in the mornings, Glutton's laughing voice caught up with him:

"Tolya, why do you have such a long face? Have you been crying?"

Children began sticking their heads out of the windows of their big house, and this excited Zhora-Glutton even more, and he wanted to add something, when suddenly he heard:

"Glutton, do you want a banana?"

Alik Goryachev, the son of the famous artist and a bit of an artist himself, said this. He was Tolya's friend, not the best, but also a very good one. Skinny, quick, nimble, he dashed out of the entrance with a bunch of yellow-green, crooked bananas like boomerangs.

"I want it!" shouted Zhora-Glutton, and Alik, torn one banana from the bunch, threw it to him. Zhora caught it, peeled off the skin in three strips and stuck the wet, white, mealy fruit into his mouth. Then he again looked at the window with his microscopic, lazy, cheerful eyes, sunken in a full, chubby face, and started chewing with great appetite. Finished, he threw the peel behind the sycamore and asked Alik for another one.

"Eat! Chew! Enjoy!" Alik gently stroked his hand over Zhora's head "against the grain" and gave him another banana. And again the peel flew behind the sycamore...

Alik helped everyone: whatever you asked of him, he would help, do, give.

"Tell your...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.7.2025
• Übersetzer: Igor Goriatchev
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Science Fiction
• ISBN-10: 0-00-095649-X / 000095649X
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-095649-1 / 9780000956491