"Time’s Eye" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clarke Arthur Charles, Baxter Stephen)

5. Soyuz

For Kolya the Discontinuity was subtle. It began with a lost signal, uncertain sightings, a silent stranding.

The time for the Soyuz ferry ship to detach from the Space Station had arrived. The last handshakes were exchanged, the heavy double hatches were closed, and though Soyuz remained physically attached to the Station, Kolya had already left the orbiting shack where he had spent another three months of his life. Now there was only the short journey home, a mere four hundred kilometers down through the air to the surface of the Earth, where he would be reunited with his young family.

Kolya’s full name was Anatole Konstantinovich Krivalapov. He was forty-one years old, and this tour of duty on the International Space Station had been his fourth.

Kolya, Musa and Sable, the crew of the ferry, clambered down through the living compartment of the Soyuz, making for the descent module. They were clumsy in their thick orange spacesuits, their pockets crammed with the souvenirs they intended to keep from the ground crews. The living compartment was to be jettisoned during reentry and would burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, and so was full of junk to be removed from the ISS. This included such items as medical waste and worn-out underwear. Sable Jones, the one American in the crew of three, led the way, and complained loudly in her coarse southern-USA English. “Jeez, what’s in here, Cossack jockstraps?”

Musa, the Soyuz commander, gave Kolya a silent look.

The descent compartment was a cramped little hut, filled by their three couches. Sable had been trained up on the ship’s systems, but she was the nearest thing to a passenger on this hop back to Earth. So she was first into the cabin, where she scrambled into the right-hand couch. Kolya followed, clambering down into the left-hand couch. During this descent he would serve as the spacecraft’s engineer, hence his allocation of seat. The compartment was so small that even as he headed for the furthest point of the cabin he brushed past Sable’s legs, and she glared at him.

And now Musa came plummeting down, a bright orange missile, helmet in hand. He was a bulky man anyhow, made more so by the layers of his suit. The couches were so crammed together that when the three of them were at rest their lower legs would be pressed against one another’s, and as Musa awkwardly tried to strap himself in, he shoved Kolya and Sable this way and that.

Sable’s reactions were predictable. “Where did they make this thing, a tractor factory? …”

It was a moment Musa had been waiting for. “Sable, I have listened to your mouth flapping for the last three months, and as you were commander there I could do nothing about it. But on this Soyuz ,I, Musa Khiromanovich Ivanov, am commander. And until the hatch breaks open and we are hauled out by the ground crew, you, madam, will—what is the English phrase? Shut the fuck up. ”

Sable’s face was like stone. Musa was a tough veteran of fifty who had served as Station commander himself, and had even been to the Moon, though not to command the multinational base there. They all knew that his admonishment of Sable would have been listened to by their comrades on the Station and, crucially, by the ground controllers.

Sable said through gritted teeth, “You’ll pay for that, Musa.”

Musa just grinned and turned away.

The descent compartment was cluttered. It contained the spacecraft’s main controls, as well as all the equipment that would be needed during the return to Earth: parachutes, flotation bags, survival gear, emergency rations. Its walls were lined with elasticized tags and Velcro patches, and were covered by material to be returned from the Station, including blood and stool samples from the biomed program, and cuttings Kolya himself had made from the pea plants and fruit trees he had been attempting to grow. All this stuff crowded in from the hull, reducing the space available for human beings even further.

But amid the clutter there was a window, to Kolya’s left-hand side. Through it he glimpsed the blackness of space, a slice of sky-bright Earth, and the struts and micrometeorite-dinged walls of the Station itself, shining brightly in the raw sunlight. The Soyuz, still docked to the Station, was carried by the bigger craft’s ponderous rotation, and shadows slid across Kolya’s view.

Musa worked them through the preseparation checklist, talking to the ground and to the crew in the Station. Kolya had little to do: his most important item was a pressure test of his spacesuit. This was a Russian ship, and unlike the pilot-oriented American engineering tradition, most of the systems were automated. Sable continued to grumble as she reached for various controls, which were situated around the capsule at all positions and angles. Some of them were so awkward to reach, veteran cosmonauts learned, it was better to poke at them with a wooden stick. But Kolya took a perverse pride in the ship’s low-tech, utilitarian design.

The Soyuz was like a green pepperpot, with lacy solar-cell wings stuck on the side of its cylindrical body. Seen from the windows of the Space Station the Soyuz, bathed in the brilliant sunlight of space, had looked like an ungainly insect: compared to the new American spaceplanes it was a clumsy old bird indeed. But the Soyuz was a venerable craft. It had been born in the Cold War age of Apollo, and had actually been intended to make journeys to the Moon. Remarkably, Soyuz craft had been flying twice as long as Kolya himself had been alive. Now, of course, in 2037, people had returned to the Moon—Russians among them this time! But there was no room on such exotic journeys for the Soyuz; for these faithful workhorses there was only the plod to and from the battered ISS, whose few scientific purposes had long been superseded by the lunar projects, and whose glamor had been stolen by the Mars missions—and yet which remained in orbit, kept aloft by political inertia and pride.

The moment came for the Soyuz at last to undock from the Station. Kolya heard a few subtle bumps and bangs, and the faintest of nudges, and a small sadness burst in his heart. But as an independent spacecraft the Soyuz ’s call sign that day was Stereo, and Kolya was comforted by Musa’s patient calls to the ground: “Stereo One, this is Stereo One …”

There were still three hours to go before the descent was scheduled to begin, and the crew were now set to inspect the exterior of the Station. Musa activated a program in the ship’s computer, and the Soyuz, firing its thrusters, began a series of straight-line jaunts around the Station. Each thruster burst sounded as if somebody had slammed a sledgehammer against the hull, and Kolya could see exhaust products jetting away from the little nozzles, fountains of crystals flying off in geometrically perfect straight lines. Earth and Station wheeled around him in a slow ballet. But Kolya had little time to admire the view; he and Sable, sitting by the windows, photographed the station manually, as a backup to the automated pods mounted on the Soyuz ’s exterior. It was an awkward job as each of them wore heavy spacesuit gloves.

Each thruster maneuver took the Soyuz a little further from the Station. At last the line-of-sight radio contact began to break down, and as a farewell the Station crew played them some music. As the Strauss waltz swirled tinnily under the hiss and pop of static, Kolya indulged in a little more nostalgic sadness. Kolya had grown to love the Station. He had learned to sense the great ark’s subtle rotations, and the vibrations when its big solar arrays realigned, and the rattles and bangs of the complicated ventilation system. After so long aboard, he had more deeply embedded feelings about the Station than any home he’d lived in. After all, what other home actually keeps you alive, minute by minute?

The music cut off.

Musa was frowning. “Stereo one, I am Stereo one. Ground, I am Stereo one. Come in, I am Stereo one …”

Sable said, “Hey, Kol. Can you see Station? It should have come back into view on my side by now.”

“No,” said Kolya, looking through his window. There was no sign of the Station.

“Maybe it went into shadow,” Sable said.

“I don’t think so.” The Soyuz had actually been leading the Station into Earth’s shadow. “And anyhow, we would see its lights.” He felt oddly uneasy.

Musa snapped, “Will you two be quiet? We lost the uplink from the ground.” He pressed the control pads before him. “I’ve run diagnostic checks, and have tried the backups. Stereo One, Stereo One …”

Sable closed her eyes. “Tell me you potato farmers haven’t fouled up again.”

“Shut up,” Musa said menacingly. And he continued to call, over and over, while Sable and Kolya listened in silence.

The ship’s slow rotation was now giving Kolya a direct view of Earth’s immense face. They were flying over India, he saw, and toward a sunset; the shadows from the creases of mountain ranges to the north of the subcontinent were long. But there seemed to be changes on the surface of Earth, dapples, like the play of sunlight on the floor of a turbulent lake.