"Dan Simmons - Phases of Gravity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

some subsystems aboard the shuttles and used to rent payload space aboard them every once in a
while.' Baedecker was aware that he had used the past tense, as if he were speaking about
someone who had died.
Maggie stopped to watch the rich sunlight bathe the sides of the New Delhi control tower and
terminal buildings in gold. She tucked a wayward strand of hair behind one ear and folded her
arms. 'It's hard to believe that it's been almost eighteen months since the Challenger explosion,'
she said. 'That was a terrible thing.'
'Yes,' said Baedecker.
It was ironic that he had been at the Cape for that flight. He had been present for only one
previous shuttle launch, one of the Columbia's first engineering flights almost five years earlier.
He was there in January of 1986 for the Challenger disaster only because Cole Prescott, the vice
president of Baedecker's firm, had asked him to escort a client who had bankrolled a
subcomponent in the Spartan-Halley experiment package sitting in the Challenger's payload bay.
The launch of 51-L had seemed nominal enough and Baedecker and his client were standing
in the VIP stands three miles from Pad 39-B, shielding their eyes against the late-morning sun,
when things went bad. Baedecker could remember marveling at how cold it was; he had brought
only a light cotton jacket, and the morning had been the coldest he could ever recall at the Cape.
Through binoculars, he had caught a glint of ice on the gantries surrounding the shuttle.
Baedecker remembered that he had been thinking about getting an early start to beat the
leaving crowds when the loudspeaker carried the voice of NASA's public affairs officer.
'Altitude four point three nautical miles, down-range distance three nautical miles. Engines
throttling up. Three engines now at one hundred four percent.' He had thought fleetingly of his
own launch fifteen years before, of his job relaying data while Dave Muldorff 'flew' the
monstrous Saturn V, until he was returned to the present as the loudspeaker carried Commander
Dick Scobee's voice saying, 'Roger, go at throttle up,' and Baedecker had glanced toward the
parking lots to see how congested the roads would be and a second later his client had said,
'Wow, those SRBs really create a cloud when they separate, don't they?' Baedecker had looked
up then, seen the expanding, mushrooming contrail that had nothing to do with SRB separation,
and instantly had recognized the sickening orange-red glow that lit the interior of the cloud as
hypergolic fuels ignited on contact as they escaped from the shuttle's destroyed reaction control
system and orbital maneuvering engines. A few seconds later the solid rocket boosters became
visible as they careened mindlessly from the still-expanding cumulus of the explosion. Feeling
sick to his stomach, Baedecker had turned to Tucker Wilson, a fellow Apollo-era pilot who was
still on active duty with NASA, and had said without any real hope, 'RTLS?' Tucker had shaken
his head; this was no return to launch site abort. This was what each of them had silently waited
for during their own minutes of launch. By the time Baedecker had looked up again, the first
large segments of the destroyed orbiter had begun their long, sad fall to the waiting crypt of the
sea.
In the months since Challenger, Baedecker had found it hard to believe that the country had
ever flown so frequently and competently into space. The long hiatus of earthbound doubt in
which nothing flew had become the normal state of things to Baedecker, mixing in his own mind
with a dreary sense of heaviness, of entropy and gravity triumphant, which had weighed upon
him since his own world and family had been blasted apart some months earlier.
'My friend Bruce says that Scott didn't come out of his dorm room for two days after
Challenger blew up,' said Maggie Brown as they stood in front of the New Delhi air terminal.
'Really?' said Baedecker. 'I didn't think that Scott had any interest in the space program
anymore.' He looked up as the rising sun suddenly was obscured by clouds. Color flowed out of
the world like water from a sink.
'He said he didn't care,' said Maggie. 'He said that Chernobyl and Challenger were just the first
signs of the end of the technological era. A few weeks later, he made arrangements to come to