"Rex Gordon - The Time Factor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gordon Rex)

coincides with X-ray pictures of Sara Francis quite exactly except in one particular. If you look carefully
at the slightly shadowy picture of the lower jaw, you'll see there is just one tooth missing. Not broken.
Dentistry. A clear and neat extraction. But in life today, Sara Francis still has that tooth. She's safe, I
think. We're all safe, just until she has a toothache. But when she feels she has to have that tooth out, then
everything shown in this picture, we can only assume, is due to happen at any minute. That will be the
time to take precautions. But as for closing the synchrotron down, Senator, I think on the contrary we
will have to use it to its maximum extent, and find out what we can, and act before then.'
He concluded on a deliberate and almost savage note of logic.

CHAPTER TWO
I had stood stunned in the familiar office. Through the window I could see the hangar, the building with
the centrifuge machine, and the distant sight of the rocket pads. It was the office in which they told us the
results when we had been through one of those physical or mental stress-sessions in the course of which
they had more means of instilling terror, we said, than had ever been known to man.
 It was in that office too that they told those of us who had failed, when their hopes and ambitions
were suddenly at an end and they were out. But I had not expected that to happen to me.
'What did I do?' I said. I was trying to understand it. 'How do I know there's not been some mistake?
Where did I fail? In what? If it was that acceleration test last night тАФ!'
The Colonel looked at me steadily across his desk. He was accustomed to dealing with men in a state
of emotion without feeling it himself.
'I have a right to know!' I said.
'You did not fail,' he said.
I stood there dumbly. To me it seemed that there was treachery in the world around me.
'You have been appointed to other work,' he said.
I did not believe he could do it. He could, of course. A man does not sign on to become an astronaut
and fly among the stars. He signs on to do what he is told and to go to where he is sent. But I was one of
the few who had set my faith in this. I had believed in it, aimed for it, from the beginning. And I had
thought I was getting there.
'I wish to resign my commission,' I said. 'I will leave the service.'
'You will think about that again,' he said.
'It should be understood,' I said. 'A man endures so much. If he does not fail, he has a right to know
that his attainment, his sacrifice, depends only on himself.'
'Do you want me to tell you about your new work?' he said.
'No.'
He gave me a sealed envelope. 'It's in there,' he said. 'As much as can be told to you about it before
you actually get there. That's all, Major Judgen.'
He dismissed me. As I turned to go, he said:
'I'm sorry, Howard.'
I went on out. He could be sorry. He would sit at that desk for ever and a day sending other men into
space, but at least he had that much connection with the rocket programme, while I was out.
I packed quickly. We always did that. When one of us was dropped from the flight programme he
packed and got out quickly while the others were still at work. He just disappeared. It was better than
meeting to say good-bye. There was too much feeling on either side, and it happened far too often.
It was like cutting off a limb.
I was in the car before I knew what I was doing. I was in it and rolling down the highway before I
realized that I did not know where I was going. I had no home to go to. I was one of the few men who
were unmarried, and that, I guessed, must have counted against me both ways, both because they
preferred the stability of married men and because I had no dependents or others to suffer at my change
of location and change of job. But that was later thought. Just then I was driving up the highway and it
came to me as an academic thought that I might be driving in the wrong direction.