"Baxter, Stephen - Moon Six" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

Moon Six
a novelette by Stephen Baxter

Foreword
The seeds for 'Moon Six' were a fragment of speculation about what kind of
world we'd have if sf had never existed, and a NASA puff about the
spin-off possibilities of an Apollo space suit.

Moon Six

Bado was alone on the primeval beach of Cape Canaveral, in his white
lunar-surface pressure suit, holding his box of Moon rocks and sampling
tools in his gloved hand.
He lifted up his gold sun-visor and looked around. The sand was hard and
flat. A little way inland, there was a row of scrub pines, maybe ten feet
tall.
There were no ICBM launch complexes here.
There was no Kennedy Space Center, in fact: no space programme, evidently,
save for him. He was stranded on this empty, desolate beach.
As the light leaked out of the sky, an unfamiliar Moon was brightening.
Bado glared at it. "Moon Six," he said. "Oh, shit."
He took off his helmet and gloves. He picked up his box of tools and began
to walk inland. His blue overshoes, still stained dark grey from lunar
dust, left crisp Moonwalk footprints in the damp sand of the beach.

Bado drops down the last three feet of the ladder and lands on the
foil-covered footpad. A little grey dust splashes up around his feet.
Slade is waiting with his camera. "Okay, turn around and give me a big
smile. Atta boy. You look great. Welcome to the Moon." Bado can't see
Slade's face, behind his reflective golden sun-visor.
Bado holds onto the ladder with his right hand and places his left boot on
the Moon. Then he steps off with his right foot, and lets go of the LM.
And there he is, standing on the Moon.
The suit around him is a warm, comforting bubble. He hears the hum of
pumps and fans in the PLSS - his backpack, the Portable Life Support
System - and feels the soft breeze of oxygen across his face.
He takes a halting step forward. The dust seems to crunch beneath his
feet, like a covering of snow: there is a firm footing beneath a soft,
resilient layer a few inches thick. His footprints are miraculously sharp,
as if he's placed his ridged overshoes in fine, damp sand. He takes a
photograph of one particularly well-defined print; it will persist here
for millions of years, he realises, like the fossilised footprint of a
dinosaur, to be eroded away only by the slow rain of micrometeorites, that
echo of the titanic bombardments of the deep past.
He looks around.
The LM is standing in a broad, shallow crater. Low hills shoulder above
the close horizon. There are craters everywhere, ranging from several
yards to a thumbnail width, the low sunlight deepening their shadows.
They call the landing site Taylor Crater, after that district of El Lago -
close to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston - where he and Fay have