"Geoffrey A. Landis - Walk in the Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

A WALK IN THE SUN
by Geoffrey A. Landis
Version 1.0

The pilots have a saying: a good landing is any landing you can walk away from.

Perhaps Sanjiv might have done better, if he'd been alive. Trish had done the best she could. All things
considered, it was a far better landing than she had any right to expect.

Titanium struts, pencilslender, had never been designed to take the force of a landing. Paperthin pressure
walls had buckled and shattered, spreading wreckage out into the vacuum and across a square kilometer of
lunar surface. An instant before impact she remembered to blow the tanks. There was no explosion, but no
landing could have been gentle enough to keep Moonshadow together. In eerie silence, the fragile ship had
crumpled and ripped apart like a discarded aluminum can.

The piloting module had torn open and broken loose from the main part of the ship. The fragment settled
against a crater wall. When it stopped moving, Trish unbuckled the straps that held her in the pilot's seat and
fell slowly to the ceiling. She oriented herself to the unaccustomed gravity, found an undamaged EVA pack
and plugged it into her suit, then crawled out into the sunlight through the jagged hole where the living module
had been attached.

She stood on the grey lunar surface and stared. Her shadow reached out ahead of her, a pool of inky black in
the shape of a fantastically stretched man. The landscape was rugged and utterly barren, painted in stark
shades of grey and black.
"Magnificent desolation," she whispered. Behind her, the sun hovered just over the mountains, glinting off
shards of titanium and steel scattered across the cratered plain.

Patricia Jay Mulligan looked out across the desolate moonscape and tried not to weep.

First things first. She took the radio out from the shattered crew compartment and tried it. Nothing. That was
no surprise; Earth was over the horizon, and there were no other ships in cislunar space.

After a little searching she found Sanjiv and Theresa. In the low gravity they were absurdly easy to carry.
There was no use in burying them. She sat them in a niche between two boulders, facing the sun, facing
west, toward where the Earth was hidden behind a range of black mountains. She tried to think of the right
words to say, and failed. Perhaps as well; she wouldn't know the proper service for Sanjiv anyway. "Goodbye,
Sanjiv. Goodbye, Theresa. I wishI wish things would have been different. I'm sorry." Her voice was barely more
than a whisper. "Go with God."

She tried not to think of how soon she was likely to be joining them.

She forced herself to think. What would her sister have done? Survive. Karen would survive. First: inventory
your assets.
She was alive, miraculously unhurt. Her vacuum suit was in serviceable condition. Lifesupport was powered
by the suit's solar arrays; she had air and water for as long as the sun continued to shine. Scavenging the
wreckage yielded plenty of unbroken food packs; she wasn't about to starve.

Second: call for help. In this case, the nearest help was a quarter of a million miles over the horizon. She
would need a highgain antenna and a mountain peak with a view of Earth.