"Davis, Jerry - Abandon in Place" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davis Jerry)

with distance.
The glare left afterimages when he blinked. He didn't care. He watched the
rocket arc over and begin its long downrange run, picking up orbital velocity
now that it had cleared the thickest part of the atmosphere.
The door behind him burst open and a flood of white-jacketed technicians
scrambled out. The first few stopped when they saw the enormous plume of exhaust
rising into the sky, and the ones behind them piled into their backs, forcing
them forward until everyone was packed near the railing. Molly, the payload
foreman, gave Rick a hand up, and bent close to his ear to shout over the roar
of the rocket and the babble of voices, "What the hell was that?"
Rick shook his head. "Damned if I know."
"There wasn't supposed to be a launch today," she said.
Rick looked up at the dwindling rocket, now just a bright spark aiming for the
sun, and said, "Something tells me Control was just as surprised as we were." He
pointed toward the base of the exhaust plume, where the cloud had spread out
enough to reveal the gantry again.
"What?" Molly asked, squinting to see through the billowing steam. Then she
realized what he was pointing at. "Isn't that pad thirty-four?"
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Molly and her payload crew reluctantly trooped back into the mating bay to see
if the shaking had damaged their satellite, but since Rick was on his own time
he rode the cage elevator down to the ground, climbed into his pickup, and
joined the line of cars streaming toward the launch site.
The scrub oak and palmetto that lined the service road prevented anyone from
seeing the pad until they had nearly reached it. Rick thought he should have
been able to see the 400-foot gantry, at least, but when he arrived at the pad
he realized why he hadn't. It had vanished just as mysteriously as it had
arrived, leaving not a trace.
Rick drove across the vast concrete apron to the base of the old launch
pedestal. It looked like an enormous concrete footstool: four squat legs holding
a ten-foot-thick platform forty feet in the air, with a thirty-foot-wide hole in
the platform for the rocket exhaust to pour through. Off to the side stood the
foundation and the thick blast protection wall of the building that had once
housed propellant pumps and service equipment. Now both structures looked old
and weathered. Rust streaks ran down their gray sides, and stenciled on the
pitted concrete, the paint itself fading now, were the words, "ABANDON IN
PLACE."
Weeds grew out of cracks in the apron, still green and vigorous even right up
next to the pedestal. Rick was beginning to doubt what he'd seen, because
obviously nothing had launched from this pad for at least a decade.
But the contrail still arched overhead, high-altitude winds snaking it left and
right, and when Rick opened the door and stepped out of his pickup he smelled
the unmistakable mixture of RP-1 smoke and steam and scorched cement that came
with a launch.
Doors slammed as more people got out of their cars. Dozens of them were there
already, and more arrived every minute, but what should have been an unruly mob
was strangely quiet. Nobody wanted to admit what they'd seen, especially in the
face of so much conflicting evidence.
Rick recognized Tessa McClain, an experienced astronaut whom he'd dated a few
times in the last couple of months, climbing out of the back of a white van