"Cassutt, Michael - More Adventures On Other Planets" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cassutt Michael)

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In between shifts, Earl deals with ex-wives Kerry and Jilliane. The old bitterness toward and from Kerry still garbles communications between them, the way a solar flare degrades the SLIPPER link. The fact of Earl's new condition only means that Kerry will allow some sympathy and tenderness to leak into encounters that have been frosty for years. The same applies to the children, Ben and Marcy.
Jilliane, who ultimately left Earl four years ago, is consumed by guilt, and offers herself as everything from nurse to sexual partner, until Earl's work schedule and general moodiness cause her to remember why she ran off in the first place. Rebecca's presence makes her feel superfluous.

Then there is Jordan, who takes time from her family and flies to La Jolla for a visit. She meets Rebecca, and offers her approval, and will be present whenever Earl needs her. At the moment, that's not often. He believes he will beat the diseaseЧat least postponing his inevitable doom by five years.

A month to the day after meeting Rebecca, after his diagnosis, Earl shows up at AGC mission control with his head shaved. Concerned about his privacy, and surprised, Rebecca can't ask him why until hours later.

"I start chemo on Monday," Earl says, tentatively rubbing his shiny dome. "The hair is going to be the first casualty."

"Not right away!" she says, protesting.

"No. But everyone will be able to see it coming out in clumps, and I'd rather not display my deterioration so soon."

Rebecca's despair over Earl's change in looksЧthe pale, naked skull is not an improvementЧand Earl's own ambivalence over what may have been a self-destructive impulse are lost in the broad spectrum noise emerging from the science support room at AGC mission control. The submersible element, after three weeks of increasingly frustrating dives in the lightless freezing slurry that is Europa-under-the-crust, has picked up motion at the very limit of its sonar system.

Is it some sort of animal or plant life? Or is it a spurious signal? The science team and its journalistic symbionts spread the news anyway.

When Earl and Rebecca return to AGC early the next day for their shifts, they are forced to park off the site and walk through the crowd that has gathered.

Earl, just out of a chemo session, is weakened by the walk and the wait to a degree he finds astonishing. He barely has the strength to zip up his SLIPPER suit, alarming the medical support team, who know by now that he has a "problem."

Even Rebecca finds herself distracted and jittery when she finally dons her SLIPPER suit to resume the mapping operation.

It is Element Rebecca and Element Earl who find themselves together on the Europan ice plain. "Just imagine," Rebecca says, thumping one of her manipulators on the surface, "something is swimming around down there."

"Yeah, the submersible."

"Come on! I mean some Europan jellyfish! Doesn't that excite you?"

"Only because it means we accomplished the mission."

"That's not very romantic."

"Who said I was romantic?"

"You did. You and your blue eyes and your goddamned boat and sailing to CatlinaЧ"

"Well, I'm not feeling very romantic these days. Unless dying of the same disease that killed U. S. Grant and Babe Ruth is romantic."

In La Jolla, Rebecca forms an answer, but even at three hundred-plus times light speed, there is not enough time to relay it, because Element Rebecca has rolled across a thin sheet of ice insufficient to support even a mass of a twenty kilograms.

The ice cracks, separates. As Element Earl helplessly records the scene from a distance of sixty-five meters, Element Rebecca teeters in the fissure, antenna slewing one way, the drilling arm swinging forward in what can only be a desperate search for traction, then silently disappears into a crevasse.