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

and probably some he doesn't, for later in the mission. But it is hard to
see how he's pulled this one off. There is nowhere to hide, damn it.
He gets to where he thinks Slade was last standing. There is no sign of
Slade. And there aren't even any footsteps, he realises now. The only
marks under his feet are those made by his own boots, leading off a few
yards away, to the north.
And they start out of nothing, it seems, like Man Friday steps in the
crisp virgin Moon-snow. As if he's stepped out of nowhere onto the
regolith.
When he looks back to the east, he can't see the LM either.
"Slade, this isn't funny, damn it." He starts to bound, hastily, back in
the direction of the LM. His clumsy steps send up parabolic sprays of dust
over unmarked regolith.
He feels his breath getting shallow. It isn't a good idea to panic. He
tells himself that maybe the LM is hidden behind some low ridge. Distances
are deceptive here, in this airless sharpness.
"Houston, Bado. I gets some kind of situation here." There isn't a reply
immediately; he imagines his radio signal crawling across the
light-seconds' gulf to Earth. "I'm out of contact with Slade. Maybe he's
fallen somewhere, out of sight. And I don't seem to be able to see the LM.
And -"
And someone's wiped over our footsteps, while I wasn't looking.
Nobody is replying, he realises.
That stops him short. Dust falls over his feet. On the surface of the
Moon, nothing is moving.
He looks up at the crescent Earth. "Ah, Houston, this is Bado. Houston.
John, come in, capcom."
Just silence, static in his headset.
He starts moving to the east again, breathing hard, the sweat pooling at
his neck.

He rented an apartment.
He got himself a better job in a radio store. In the Air Force, before
joining NASA, he'd specialised in electronics. He'd been apprehensive that
he might not be able to find his way around the gear here, but he found it
simple - almost crude, compared to what he'd been used to. They had
transistors here, but they still used big chunky valves and paper
capacitors. It was like being back in the early '60s. Radios were popular,
but there were few TVs: small black and white gadgets, the reception
lousy.
He began watching the TV news and reading the newspapers, trying to figure
out what kind of world he'd been dropped in.
The weather forecasts were lousy.
And foreign news reports, even on the TV, were sent by wire, like they'd
been when he was a kid, and were often a day or two out of date.
The Vietnam war was unfolding. But there'd been none of the protests
against the war, here, that he'd seen back at home. There were no live TV
pictures, no colour satellite images of soldiers in the mud and the rain,
napalming civilians. Nobody knew what was happening out there. The
reaction to the war was more like what he remembered of World War Two.