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

made their home. This pond of frozen lava is a relatively smooth, flat
surface in a valley once flooded by molten rock. Their main objective for
the flight is another crater a few hundred yards to the west that they've
named after Slade's home district of Wildwood. Surveyor 7, an unmanned
robot probe, set down in Wildwood a few years before; the astronauts are
here to sample it.
This landing site is close to Tycho, the fresh, bright crater in the
Moon's southern highlands. As a kid Bado had sharp vision. He was able to
see Tycho with his naked eyes, a bright pinprick on that ash-white
surface, with rays that spread right across the face of the full Moon.
Now he is here.
Bado turns and bounces back towards the LM.

After a few miles he got to a small town.
He hid his lunar pressure suit in a ditch, and, dressed in his
tube-covered cooling garment, snuck into someone's back yard. He stole a
pair of jeans and a shirt he found hanging on the line there.
He hated having to steal; he didn't plan on having to do it again.
He found a small bar. He walked straight in and asked after a job. He knew
he couldn't afford to hesitate, to hang around figuring what kind of world
he'd finished up in. He had no money at all, but right now he was
clean-shaven and presentable. A few days of sleeping rough would leave him
too dirty and stinking to be employable.
He got a job washing glasses and cleaning out the john. That first night
he slept on a park bench, but bought himself breakfast and cleaned himself
up in a gas station john.
After a week, he had a little money saved. He loaded his lunar gear into
an old trunk, and hitched to Daytona Beach, a few miles up the coast.

They climb easily out of Taylor.
Their first Moonwalk is a misshapen circle which will take them around
several craters. The craters are like drill holes, the geologists say,
excavations into lunar history.
The first stop is the north rim of a hundred-yard-wide crater they call
Huckleberry Finn. It is about three hundred yards west of the LM.
Bado puts down the tool carrier. This is a hand-held tray, with an
assortment of gear: rock hammers, sample bags, core tubes. He leans over,
and digs into the lunar surface with a shovel. When he scrapes away the
grey upper soil he finds a lighter grey, just under the surface.
"Hey, Slade. Come look at this."
Slade comes floating over. "How about that. I think we found some ray
material." Ray material here will be debris from the impact which formed
Tycho.
Lunar geology has been shaped by the big meteorite impacts which pounded
its surface in prehistory. A main purpose of sending this mission so far
south is to keep them away from the massive impact which created the Mare
Imbrium, in the northern hemisphere. Ray material unpolluted by Imbrium
debris will let them date the more recent Tycho impact.
And here they have it, right at the start of their first Moonwalk.
Slade flips up his gold visor so Bado can see his face, and grins at him.