"Gordon R. Dickson - Analog - The Far Call Part" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

Warner's picture disintegrated into a crazy quilt of color which swirled away like water down a drain
to a single bright dot in the center of the screen; and left the screen pearl-gray, quiescent.
 "Good-bye," said Jen emptily, to the empty surface before him.
He pulled his own scrambler, put it in his jacket pocket and went back to a seat on the bus.
It had risen on its air cushion some moments since; and was sliding along the asphalt roadpath in the
direction of the shuttle launch site. He sat down in one of the three heavy lounge chairs that had been
pulled together to form a group. Occupying the chair beside him was Bill Ward, listening with brisk,
controlled patience to the Russian Deputy Minister for the Development of Space, Sergei Varisov.
". .. your brother," Varisov was saying. "A doctor of veterinary medicine, I understand?"
"Yes," Bill Ward said, "he's on the faculty at the University of Minnesota Veterinary SchoolтАФ"
He broke off, standing up as the bus slid imperceptibly to a halt.
"Excuse me," he said to Varisov, and turned to raise his voice so that it could be heard through the
whole of the bus. "I'm afraid this is as close as we can come right now to the shuttlecraft because the area
has to be kept clear for last minute checking and the pre-fueling operations. However, we're close
enough so that you can get a good look."
They were, indeed, quite close. It was the opposite side of the bus that faced the launch pad on
which the shuttlecraft stood upright, but the bus itself was so sparsely passengered that Jen could see
between the opposite lounge chairs clearly without needing to stand up or move.
The bus had halted at the foot of the ramp leading up to the launch platform holding the shuttlecraft. It
was not, of course, simply a smooth, upright, three-stage, space-going vehicle as the Saturn rockets had
been. Awaiting launch, it rested, as they had .done, in vertical position; but unlike them, it looked like one
heavy-bodied small aircraft glued to the back of its identical big brother. The mobile launch structure
alongside held both sky-pointing vehicles in a spidery embrace.
"The orbiter will ride piggyback on the booster," Bill Ward was lecturing the Deputy Ministers, "to
about two hundred thousand feet. By this time we're about three minutes past lift-off. Then separation
occursтАФ"
Someone broke in with a question. His mind still occupied with a confusion of ideas about Tad
Hansard's concern and his own thoughts about shark-remora partnerships, Jen only belatedly recognized
the thick voice of the German Deputy Minister for the Development of Space and lost the sense of the
question entirely.
"No, the booster lands like any other aircraftтАФslides in, actually, on its belly skids," Bill Ward was
answering. "Just the same way the orbiter itself does, when it comes back. Both are piloted. Meanwhile,
after it separates from the booster, the orbiter proceeds to climb into the parking orbit of the space
station . . ."
Staring out through the light-reducing glass bubble that covered the top half of the bus, Jen felt a
strange disbelief. Here, at only a couple of hundred yards from the launch pad, the two parts of the
shuttlecraft loomed impossibly large. There was something about them like the eye-tricking size of the
huge Vehicle Assembly Building the diplomats had been taken through before lunch. All these structures
and machines were too big to be real, too titanic not to be a mock-up by some movie-maker whose only
aim was to awe the audience with his film.
Man had gotten out of scale, somehow, with earthside reality. But on the other hand how far was
MarsтАФhow far, really? How far in fact was thirty-six million miles, when the Vehicle Assembly Building
was only three miles away, when downtown Cocoa Beach was only seventeen miles away? How deep
was the ocean of nothingness that was space? Jen shivered, thinking of infinity.
". . . we've just finished mating the orbiter to the booster," Bill Ward was saying. "The pre-launch
checkout has been going on for some time, a matter of checking innumerable little details . . ."
. . . With our own few planets swimming in their orbits, around the many-times greater
sunтАФand this sun a small light lost among far greater suns ...
Jen felt a firm grip on his forearm; and saw the face of Varisov only a few inches away, looking at
him with concern on the round, aging features. He realized suddenly that he was a little dizzy, that he must