"Baxter, Stephen - Manifold 03 - Origin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

'I'd have been point man on STS-194,' Malenfant spat. The Caped Crusader.
Checking the soap dispensers in the orbiter john. Strapping some other asshole
into my seat on the flight deck.'

'I gather you didn't take the job,' Emma said dryly.

'I took it okay,' he snapped. 'I took it and shoved it sideways up that pencil
pusher's fat ass.'

'Oh, Malenfant,' she sighed.

She tried to imagine the meeting in that rather grand office, before a floor-to
ceiling office window with its view of the park-like JSC campus, complete with
the giant Saturn V Moon rocket lying there on its side as if it had crashlanded
beside the driveway. Even in these days of decline, there were too few seats for
too many eager crew-persons, so - in what seemed to Emma his own very small
world - Bridges wielded a great deal of power indeed.

She had never met this man, this Bridges. He might be an efficient bureaucrat,
the kind of functionary the aviator types would sneer at, but who held together
any major organization like NASA. Or perhaps this Bridges transcended his role;
perhaps he was the type who had leveraged his position to accrete power beyond
his rank. With the gifts at his disposal, she thought, he might have built up a
network of debtors in the Astronaut Office and beyond, in all the places in
NASA's sprawling empire ex-astronauts might reach.

Well, so what? Emma had encountered any number of such people in her own long,
complex and moderately successful career in the financial departments of high
tech corporations. No organization was a rational place. Organizations were bear
pits where people fought for their own projects, which might or might not have
something to do with the organization's supposed mission. The wise person
accepted that, and found a way to get what she wanted in spite of it all.

But to Malenfant - Malenfant the astronaut, an odd idealist about human
behaviour, always a loner, always impatient with the most minimal bureaucracy,
barely engaged with the complexities of the world - to Malenfant, Joe Bridges,
controlling the most important thing in his entire life (more important than me,
she thought) could be nothing but a monster.

She stared out the window at the baked African plain. It was huge and ancient,
she thought, a place that would endure all but unchanged long after the little
white moth that buzzed over it today was corroded to dust, long after the
participants in this tiny domestic drama were mouldering bones.

Now she heard a whisper from the ground-to-air radio. It sounded like Bill
London, good old bullshitter Bill from Annapolis, with some garbled report about
UFOs over central Africa.

The plane veered to the right, and the rising sun wheeled around the cockpit,
sparking from scuffs in the Plexiglas around her.