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

But that had been before the word had come through from the Johnson Space
Center, headquarters of NASA's manned spaceflight programme, that Malenfant had
been washed out of his next mission, STS-194.

Well, that was the end of it. With a couple of phone calls Malenfant had cut
short their stay in Joburg, and begun to can the rest of the tour. He had been
able to get out of all of it except for a reception at the US ambassador's
residence in Nairobi, Kenya.

To her further dismay, Malenfant had leaned on Bill London - an old classmate
from Annapolis, now a good buddy in the South African Navy - to let him fly them
both up to Nairobi from out of a Joburg military airfield in a T-38, a sleek
veteran supersonic jet trainer, a mode of transport favoured by the astronauts
since the 1960s.

It wasn't the first time Emma had been taken for a ride in one of those toy
planes, and with Malenfant in this mood she knew she could expect to be thrown
around the sky. And she shuddered at the thought of how Malenfant in this
wounded state was going to behave when he got to Nairobi.

But she had gone along anyhow. Somehow she always did.

So that was how Emma Stoney, forty-five-year-old accountant, had found herself
in a gear room getting dressed in a blue flight suit, oxygen mask, oversized
boots, helmet, going through the procedures for using her parachute and survival
kit and emergency oxygen, struggling to remember the purpose of the dozens of
straps, lanyards and D-rings.

Malenfant was ready before she was, of course. He stomped out into the bright
morning sunlight towards the waiting T-38. He carried his helmet and his flight
plan, and his bald head gleamed in the sun, bronzed and smooth as a piece of
machinery itself. But his every motion was redolent with anger and frustration.

Emma had to run to keep up with him, laden down with all her absurd right-stuff
gear. By the time she reached the plane she was hot already. She had to be
hoisted into her seat by two friendly South African female techs, like an old
lady being lifted into the bath. Malenfant was in his cockpit, angrily going
through a pre-takeoff checkout.

The T-38 was sleek and brilliant white. Its wings were stubby, and it had two
bubble cockpits, one behind the other. The plane was disturbingly small; it
seemed barely wide enough to squeeze in a whole person. Emma studied an array of
controls and dials and softscreen readouts at whose purpose she could only
guess. The venerable T-38 had been upgraded over the years - those shimmering
softscreen readouts, for instance - but every surface was scuffed and worn with
use, the metal polished smooth where pilots' gloved hands had rubbed against it,
the leather of her seat extensively patched.

The last few minutes of the prep wore away quickly, as one of the ground crew