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

The girl shrugged. Then her eyes lit up. 'Hey, I've got an idea! Why don't you spend some time
sightseeing with me? I've been trying to get Scott to see something other than the Poona ashram
since I got here in March. Come with me! It'll be fun. You can get an Air India in-country pass
for next to nothing.' Still thinking about the group-sex rumors, Baedecker was taken aback for a
moment. Then he saw the childlike eagerness in Maggie's face and chided himself for being a
lecherous old man. The girl was lonely.
'Where would you be going?' he asked. He needed a second to form a polite rejection.
'I'll be leaving Delhi tomorrow,' she said brightly. 'I'll fly to Varanasi, then to Khajuraho, a
stopover in Calcutta, then Agra and back to Poona later in the week.'
'What's in Agra?'
'Only the Taj Mahal,' said Maggie and leaned toward him with a mischievous look in her eyes.
'You can't see India and not see the Taj Mahal. It's not allowed.'
'Sorry. I'll have to,' said Baedecker. 'I have an appointment in Bombay tomorrow and you say
Scott will be back Tuesday. I need to fly home no later than a week from Friday. I'm stretching
this trip out as it is.' He could see the disappointment even as she nodded.
'Besides,' he said, 'I'm not much of a tourist.'
The American flag had looked absurd to Baedecker. He had expected to be stirred by it. Once
in Djakarta, after being away from the States for only nine months, he had been moved to tears
by the sight of the American flag flying from the stern of an old freighter in the harbor. But on
the moon — a quarter million miles from home — he could think only of how silly the flag
looked with its wire extended stiffly to simulate a breeze in the hard vacuum.
 He and Dave had saluted. They stood downsun of the television camera they had erected and
saluted. Unconsciously, they had already fallen into the habit of leaning forward in the low-gee
'tired ape' position Aldrin had warned them about in briefings. It was comfortable and felt
natural, but it photographed poorly.
They had finished the salute and were ready to lope off to other things, when President Nixon
talked to them. For Baedecker it had been Nixon's patched-in, impromptu phone call that had
pushed an unreal experience into the realm of the surreal. The president obviously had not
planned what he would say during his call, and the monologue wandered. Several times it
seemed that he had ended his sentence and they would begin to reply only to have Nixon's voice
come in again. The transmission lag added to the problem. Dave did most of the talking.
Baedecker said, 'Thank you, Mr. President,' several times. For some reason Nixon thought that
they would want to know the football scores from the previous day's games. Baedecker loathed
football. He wondered if this prattle about football was Nixon's idea of how men talked to men.
'Thank you, Mr. President,' Baedecker had said. And all the time he stood there in the camera's
eye, facing a frozen flag against a black sky and listening to the static-lashed maunderings of his
nation's chief executive, Baedecker was thinking about the unauthorized object he had hidden in
the contingency sample pocket above his right knee.
The Delhi-Bombay flight was three hours late getting off. A British helicopter salesman sitting
next to Baedecker in the terminal said that the Air India pilot and flight engineer had been having
a feud for weeks now. One or the other would hold up the flight every day.
Once airborne, Baedecker tried to doze, but the incessant chiming of call-buttons kept him
awake. They had no sooner taken off than every other person on the aircraft seemed to be ringing
for the saried stewardesses. The three men in the row ahead of Baedecker were loudly
demanding pillows, demanding drinks, and snapping their fingers in an imperious manner that
went against his Midwestern, egalitarian grain.
Maggie Brown had left him shortly after breakfast. She had scribbled her 'Grand Tour
Itinerary' on a napkin and stuffed it into the coat pocket of his suit. 'You never know,' she said.
'Something might happen to change your mind.' Baedecker had asked a few more questions
about Scott before she drove off in a black-and-yellow cab, but his overall impression was of a