"Ian R. MacLeod - Home Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

IAN R. MACLEOD

HOME TIME

MORNINGS HERE ARE JUST as bad as mornings anywhere else. I sit up in my bunk and
scowl at the mirror. The ceiling feels close as a coffin over head, and if I
reach out either way, I can touch the walls. We travelers need a tight place to
call our own; a burrow to crawl into. Here at Epsilon Base, we call them torpedo
tubes.

It's my turn to fix breakfast. The three of us chomp shriveled waffles and
pseudo-bacon hunched around the little table in the kitchen area. We've all put
on weight during our stay; stress and boredom do that to you. Janey's in jeans
that were tight three months ago when we started out and now look simply
painful, the same T-shirt as yesterday and the day before. Figgis rereads one of
his old technical mags, a glob of butter hanging on the strands of the beard
he's grown over a face still neat with youth. No one says a word. Janey tosses
her greasy blonde hair. She sighs. As I didn't hear any sleep-period ramblings
between their torpedo tubes, I guess I'm sitting in the chilly slipstream of a
lover's argument.

My turn to clean up. Funny how often the rota works that way, but still I can't
be bothered to argue. Gives me something to do before we get ready for the final
lump. In a nice domestic touch, Epsilon's Korean designer placed the tiny basin
beside a porthole so you can see out as you stand there. I plunge my hands into
the warm recycled water.

Outside, the storm has died. My hands pause, aimless fish swimming. Ice furs the
rim of the porthole like the white spray that was used in shop windows at
Christmas back in England when I was a kid. It's October, which means that the
sun here dances a fire around the horizon. The high . winds of a few hours ago
have left streaks in the ice like the claw marks of some giant animal. The storm
may have died, but faintly through the filtered triple glass, I can still hear
the wind. In the Antarctic, it never stops.

By the same cosmic coincidence that made it my turn to cook and clear, it also
falls to me to check the outside of Epsilon before our next Jump. There's no
room for me to kit up in my outsuit in my torpedo tube, so I have to do it in
the one corner of the cramped living pod that isn't strung with washing. Figgis
and Janey just sit around and watch as I strip down to bra and knickers. I'm
conscious of my wobbling marbled flesh and the stray bits of body hair, but of
course I'm just good old Doctor Woolley; she's past modesty and all that kind of
thing.

It feels good to squeeze into the privacy of the inner hatch, to bang it shut
and watch the warm air cloud to crystal as the frozen atmosphere gushes in.
There's no question that, barring the ocean floor, I'm facing the most hostile
atmosphere on Earth. Nothing compared to Io or Venus, of course, but astronauts
don't have to breathe the atmosphere or fiddle barehanded with bits of frozen
machinery that can peel the skin off your hands like a rubber glove. And