Друзья, если вы владеете английским, как родным, оцените, пожалуйста, читабелен ли этот отрывок? Спасибо!
It is always summer on this island. Always daytime. There is the sky, permanently blue, there is the sun always at its apex, there is the idle sea, playing around with the coastal waves. And there is me here. I am lying on the blindingly white sands and though I shall languish of heat – I don’t feel a thing. I can’t feel warmth. I can’t feel salty breeze. Not even sand beneath my body. I can raise my arms, get a handful of some sand, see the smallest grains of it sliding between my fingers. But I can’t feel. Maybe If I cut myself, I wouldn’t feel it, too. Sometimes I stand up, come into the water until it rises to my ankle and run along the margin of the sea till I am fatigued, but the fatigue never comes. Sometime ago I hoped to bump into anyone – but yet I haven’t even found a jellyfish. There are no seashells and no seaweed, nothing. Just the water, the sand and the palm trees. Virgin land. No, better saying - a dead land. Artificial. The world is unreal, and that can only mean one thing: something went wrong with me in my present world. But what was it? I can endlessly wander up and down the shore, sometimes going back to the starting point, and just as that, my mind is chasing itself in tails, unable to find an answer to the questions that tantalize me.
* * *
When an emergency happened on «MARS-2020», I was sleeping in one of the staff rooms of CYP. The undocking of the landing module with Gennadiy Alekseenko and John Hubble had finished safely an hour before. They had to go through hours of orbital descending, and a soft jet landing would follow. But my boy Roma stayed aboard, busy keeping in check all the readings. Flight director – Alexander – suggested I should have some sleep. «It won't be much interesting in the next few hours. You've got to be fresh for our arrival. See, you don’t land on Mars every day.» A short time after, a sharp sound of my handy drags me out of sleep, and I hear this voice of Alexander, weirdly altered, asking for an immediate gathering in the flight control room.