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

There really was no space programme. Not just the manned stuff had gone:
there were no weather satellites, communication satellites. Sputnik,
Explorer and all the rest just hadn't happened. The Moon was just a light
in the sky that nobody cared about, like when he was a kid. It was
brighter, though, because of that big patch of highland where Imbrium
should have been.
On the other hand, there were no ICBMs, as far as he could tell.

His mouth is bone-dry from the pure oxygen. He is breathing hard; he hears
the hiss of water through the suit's cooling system, the pipes that curl
around his limbs and chest.
There is a rational explanation for this. There has to be. Like, if he's
got out of line of sight with the LM, somehow, he's invisible to the LM's
radio relay, the Lunar Communications Relay Unit. He is linked to that by
VHF, and then by S-band to the Earth.
Yeah, that has to be it. As soon as he gets back in line of sight of the
LM, he can get in touch with home. And maybe with Slade.
But he can't figure how he can have gotten out of the LM's line of sight
in the first place. And what about the vanished footsteps?
He tries not to think about it. He just concentrates on loping forward,
back to the LM.
In a few minutes, he is back in Taylor Crater.
There is no LM. The regolith here is undisturbed.
Bado bounces across the virgin surface, scuffing it up.
Can he be in the wrong place? The lunar surface does have a tendency to
look the same everywhere ... Hell, no. He can see he is right in the
middle of Taylor; he recognises the shapes of the hills. There can't be
any doubt.
What, then? Can Slade have somehow gotten back to the LM, taken off
without him?
But how can Bado not have seen him, seen the boxy LM ascent stage lift up
into the sky? And besides, the regolith would be marked by the ascent
stage's blast.
And, he realises dimly, there would, of course, be an abandoned descent
platform here, and bits of kit. And their footsteps. His thoughts are
sluggish, his realisation coming slowly. Symptoms of shock, maybe.
The fact is that save for his own footfalls, the regolith is as unmarked
as if he's been dropped out of the sky.
And meanwhile, nobody in Houston is talking to him.
He is ashamed to find he is crying, mumbling, tears rolling down his face
inside his helmet.
He starts to walk back west again. Following his own footsteps - the
single line he made coming back to find the LM - he works his way out of
Taylor, and back to the rim of Wildwood.
Hell, he doesn't have any other place to go.
As he walks he keeps calling, for Slade, for Houston, but there is only
static. He knows his signal can't reach Earth anyway, not without the LM's
big S-band booster.
At Wildwood's rim there is nothing but the footfalls he left earlier. He
looks down into Wildwood, and there sits the Surveyor, glistening like