"Brian Plante - The Astronaut" - читать интересную книгу автора (Plante Brian)

returns. It’s sort of a welcoming-home present.”
I gulped the rest of my lemonade. Perhaps I was relieved that she wasn’t
cheating on her husband, but I was a bit jealous. Even from millions of miles away,
the famous Colonel Richard Keyes, the great hero, knocked her up. And I was just
the lawn boy. It was stupid. I was stupid.
“Um, do you, like, need a Lamaze partner or something?” I asked.
Mrs. Horton laughed, that pretty, musical laugh. “Oh, no, Davy. Richard will
be back in time for the birth. I wouldn’t have him miss that.”
Then I really felt foolish. Imagine, thinking that she would have me, the lawn
boy, in the delivery room while she gave birth. I could feel my cheeks flush with
embarrassment.
Mrs. Horton noticed I was blushing and smiled. I looked away, and she put
her arm around me and pulled me close in a hug. I could feel the swell of her breasts
against my neck, and smell her faint perfume up close.
“That is so sweet that you’d offer to do that,” she said. “You really are a true
friend, Davy.”
And then she kissed me. A friendly buss on my cheek, but a kiss nonetheless.
It only lasted seconds, but it was the first time I’d ever been kissed by someone who
wasn’t a relative. My first kiss from an astronaut’s wife.
Later that night, I started looking at MIT’s course catalog.
****
Three months later, the Romulus had made its way back and taken up orbit
around Earth. The crew was transferred to an orbital ferry for the final short leg
home. Mrs. Horton asked me to keep an eye on the house for a few days, saying she
had some business to attend to, still keeping her secret until the last possible
moment. I knew she was really going to the cape to welcome her husband home on
landing.
The reentry was late on an afternoon in May, and I decided to watch it on
Mrs. Horton’s big holovision set. I let myself in, after school, and sat in her family
room in front of the huge screen.
 You couldn’t see the hunk of space debris on the live feed from the orbital
ferry. One minute everything was fine, and the craft was starting the burn that would
bring it down, then the next moment there was an explosion and the whole ship
seemed ablaze, with sirens going off and lights flashing. The picture broke up a few
seconds later.
The news anchor who took over seemed not to know anything more than
what everyone had just seen on the live shipboard camera: something had gone
terribly wrong. It was several minutes before they would confirm that the ferry had
broken up and all of the crewmembers had perished in the accident.
I turned the holovision off, locked up the house, and trudged home. I didn’t
cry until I got back to my bedroom and shut the door.
Do astronauts ever cry? What difference did it make if astronauts cried or
not? I cried, but I was just a stupid kid.
Over the next few weeks, the whole world went into mourning. It took the
death of those four astronauts to make the space program big news again. The
mission was, overall, a success. The Romulus and all its samples were still in orbit.
All the data collected was safely stored in computers on the ground. Only the crew
didn’t make it home.
I watched the memorial service on holovision. Mrs. Horton was easy to
spot—her strawberry blonde hair and pregnant figure easily recognizable in the