"Davis, Jerry - Abandon in Place" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davis Jerry)

Copyright й1996 by Jerry Oltion
First Appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

ABANDON IN PLACE
by Jerry Oltion

Six hours after Deke Slayton, the astronaut, died of cancer, his racing airplane
took off from a California airport and never came down. The pilot didn't respond
to the control tower, and the plane vanished from radar shortly after takeoff,
but witnesses clearly identified it as Slayton's. Which was impossible, because
that same airplane was in a museum in Nevada at the time.
The story made the rounds at the Cape. Engineers and administrators and
astronauts all passed it along like scouts telling ghost stories around a
campfire, but nobody took it seriously. It was too easy to mistake one plane for
another, and everyone knew how fast rumors could get started. They had heard
plenty of them over the years, from the guy who'd claimed to be run off the road
by Grissom's Corvette after the Apollo 1 fire to the Australian who'd supposedly
found a piece of Yuri Gagarin's spacesuit in the debris that rained over the
outback when Skylab came down. This was just one more strange bit of folklore
tacked onto the Apollo era, which was itself fast fading into legend.
Then Neil Armstrong died, and a Saturn V launched itself from pad 34.
Rick Spencer was there the morning it went up. He had flown his T-38 down from
Arlington right after the funeral, grabbed a few hours of sleep right there at
the Cape, then driven over to the shuttle complex before dawn to watch the
ground crew load a communications satellite into the Atlantis. The ungainly
marriage of airplane and rocket on pad 39A would be his ticket to orbit in
another week if they ever got the damned thing off the ground, but one of the
technicians forgot to mark a step off his checklist and the whole procedure shut
down while the foreman tried to decide whether to back up and verify the job or
take the tech at his word when he said he'd done it. Rick was getting tired of
waiting for somebody to make a decision, so he went outside the sealed payload
mating bay for a breath of fresh air.
The sun had just peeked over the horizon. The wire catwalk beneath his feet and
the network of steel girders all around him glowed reddish gold in the dawn
light. The hammerhead crane overhead seemed like a dragon's long, slender neck
and head leaning out to sniff curiously at the enormous winged orbiter that
stood there sweating with dew beneath its gaze. The ground, nearly two hundred
feet below, was still inky black. Sunlight hadn't reached it yet, wouldn't for a
few more minutes. The ocean was dark, too, except near the horizon where the
brilliant crescent of sun reflected off the water.
From his high catwalk Rick looked down the long line of launch pads to the
south, the tops of their gantries projecting up into the light as well. Except
for pads 34 and 37. Those two had been decommissioned after the Apollo program,
and now all that remained were the concrete bunkers and blast deflectors that
couldn't be removed, low gray shapes still languishing in the shadow of early
dawn. Just like the whole damned space program, Rick thought. Neil had been
given a hero's burial, and the President's speech had been full of promise for
renewed support of manned exploration in space, but it was all a lot of hot air
and everyone knew it. The aging shuttle fleet was all America had, and all it
was likely to get for the foreseeable future. Even if NASA could shake off the