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

Far off, to left and right, she saw contrails and glittering darts. Fighter
planes, perhaps, converging on the strange anomaly sighted over Olduval,
whatever it was, if it existed at all.

She felt an odd frisson of anticipation.

'It took them a morning,' Malenfant said. 'They brung in a dozen Russian doctors
to probe at my every damn orifice. A bunch of snowy-haired old farts with pubic
hair growing out of their noses, with no experience of space medicine. They
ought to have no jurisdiction over the way we run our programme.'

'It's their programme too,' she said quietly. 'What did they say?'

'One of them pulled me up over my shoulder.' Malenfant suffered from a nerve
palsy behind his right shoulder, the relic of an ancient football injury, a
condition NASA had long ago signed off on. 'Well, our guys gave them shit. But
the fossil stood his ground.

'Then they took me into the Commission itself. I was sat on a stage with the guy
who was going to be my judge, in front of an auditorium full of white-haired
Russian doctors, and two NASA guys who were as mad as hell, like me. But the old
asshole from the surgical group got up and said my shoulder was a "disqualifying
condition" that needed further tests, and our guys said I wasn't going to do
that, and so the Russians said I was disqualified anyhow...'

Emma frowned, trying to puzzle it out. It sounded like a pretext to her;
Malenfant had after all flown twice to the Station before, and the Russians must
have known all about his shoulder, like everything else about him. Why should it
suddenly become a mission-threatening disability now?

Malenfant put the little jet through a gut-wrenching turn so tight she thought
she heard the hull creak. 'I knew we'd appeal,' he said. 'Those two NASA
surgeons were livid, I'm telling you. They said they'd pass it all the way up
the line, I should just get on with my training as if I was planning to fly,
they'd clear me through. Hell, I believed them. But it didn't happen. When it
got to Bridges -'

'Was your shoulder the only thing the Russians objected to?'

He hesitated.

'Malenfant?'

'No,' he said reluctantly. 'They smuggled shrinks' remarks into their final
report to NASA. They should have presented them at the Commission... Hey, can
you see something? Look, right on the horizon.'

She peered into the north. The horizon was a band of dusty, mist-laden air, grey
between brown earth and blue sky, precisely curving. Was something there? - a
spark of powder-blue, a hint of a circle, like a lens flare?