"Alan Dean Foster - Transformers - Ghosts of Yesterday" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

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Chapter One



Standing taller than a thirty-six-story building and weighing six million, seven hundred thousand pounds, in
the year 1969 the Saturn V moon rocket was the biggest man-made object ever sent into space.
Representing the epitome of human research, it was a technological marvel that awed even those whose
dedication and long, hard labor had come together to make it a reality.

No one on Earth suspected that there were forces at work throughout the galaxy, good as well as evil, to
whom the massive rocket was nothing more than an oversized firecracker.

Though not the first Saturn V to be launched from Kennedy Space Center, Apollo 11 was special. The
three astronauts waiting patiently in the capsule atop what was, after all, little more than a gigantic but
hopefully domesticated flying bomb had trained long and hard for the coming mission, but they were still
human. They were not machines, and they were certainly not robots. All three of them had families and
lives they fully intended to return to. No one doubted the success of the forthcoming venture, but that did
not mean they had no qualms. The tons of explosive fuel waiting to be ignited just aft of their backsides
were enough to induce second thoughts in even the most highly trained individual.

Too late for any kind of thoughts now except those essential to carrying out the launch. Switches were
thrown, readouts checked and rechecked, the primitive computational devices of the late 1960s engaged.
Over the craft's internal speakers the three waiting astronauts could hear the composed voice of Mission
Control.

"T minus thirty seconds and counting." Simple words for some of the most complex coordinated activities
humankind had ever attempted. The men on board responded as they had been trained to do.

"Astronauts report all systems check out," the controller announced. "T minus twenty-five seconds and
counting."
While the men onboard devoted their full attention to their respective instruments, they still managed to
find time for personal thoughts. Uppermost among these was the certain knowledge that if the launch
failed and the rocket blew, they would likely never know what had happened to them.

"T minus fifteen seconds. Guidance going to internal." The briefest, most significant of pauses, then,
"Twelve, eleven, ten, nine, ignition sequence start, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero. We have ignition
of the Saturn Five, we have ignition."

The kind of rumble one experiences only beneath the center of a supercell thunderstorm erupted from the
base of the rocket. It was as if half a dozen tornadoes had been recorded spinning around a common