"Edward M. Lerner - Moonstruck" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lerner Edward M)

- Prologue

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 - Prologue




PROLOGUE
"T minus five minutes, and holding."
It wasn't even ten in the morning, but the day was already hot. Kyle Gustafson squirted another dollop of
sunscreen into his palm, then rubbed his hands together. Smearing it over his face and neck, he
grimaced: he reeked of coconut oil. He made a mental note to avoid all open flames until he showered.
Kyle had a Scottish-American mother and a Swedish-American father, a combination that Dad called
industrial-strength WASP. He didn't belong below the forty-fifth parallel, let alone outside beneath Cape
Canaveral's summer, subtropical sunтАФbut he never missed an opportunity to witness a launch. His job
helped: who better than the presidential science advisor to escort visiting foreign dignitaries to Kennedy
Space Center?
"You could wear a hat, my friend."
I look really stupid in hats, Kyle thought. Turning toward his Russian counterpart, he suppressed that
answer as impolitic. Instead, he changed the subject. "Sorry for the delay, Sergei. The hold is built into
the schedule to allow time for responding to minor glitches."
"T minus five minutes, and holding."
His guest said nothing. Sergei Denisovich Arbatov was tall, wiry, and tanned. He'd been born and raised
in the Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula once popularly called the Russian Riviera. That nickname had
gone out of vogue when the USSR self-destructed, and an independent Ukraine had made it clear that
ethnic Russians were no longer welcome. In 1992, Sergei had moved his family to Moscow, where he'd
moved up rapidly in the new, democratic government. It wasn't clear to Kyle how Sergei avoided the
Muscovite's traditional pallorтАФunless it was by finagling trips to Florida.
"T minus five minutes, and counting."
The single-word change in the announcement made Kyle's pulse race. Across the plain from their
vantage point at the VIP launch viewing area, Atlantis shimmered through the rising waves of heated air.
The shuttle on Launch Pad 39B stood 184 feet tall, the dartlike body of the orbiter dwarfed by the solid
rocket boosters and external fuel tank to which it was attached. All but the tank were white; the
expendable metal tank, once also painted white, was now left its natural rust color to reduce takeoff
weight by 750 pounds.
"T minus four minutes, thirty seconds, and counting."
Kyle continued his standard briefing. "The gross weight of the shuttle at launch is about 4.5 million
pounds, Sergei. Impressive, don't you think?"
"Apollo/Saturn V weighed a half again more." The gray-haired Russian smiled sadly. "We never made it
to the moon, and you Americans have forgotten how. I don't know who disappoints me more."
Kyle had been thirteen the night of the first moon landing. Afterward, he'd lain awake all night,
scheming how he, too, would sometime, somehow, make a giant leap for mankind. The idealist in him
still shared Arbatov's regrets. Many days, only that boy's dream sustained Kyle through Washington's