"Allen Steele - Orbital Decay" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Allen)

Hooker nodded, forgetting that Dave could not see him. The "straighten
up" line was a tired old shuck. In microgravity there was no place for
carelessly misplaced items; a compartment in Skycan's hub always had to
be kept shipshape. Dave and his companions were doubtless putting away
long-range telephotos of Soviet silos and submarine bays and troop
movements, transcripts of messages from Washington and Langley and
Cheyenne Mountain. In a sense, the three men in the weather station
did serve as meteorologists. If asked, they could confidently explain
current weather patterns in the Western Hemisphere, tell a listener a
high pressure system hanging over the American Midwest was causing St.
Louis to feel like an anteroom of Hell or why a front coming in from
the Pacific was dumping rain over northern California and Oregon. But
everyone in Olympus Station's hundred-person complement, except for the
occasional greenhorn who happened to ask why the three meteorologists
generally kept to themselves, knew that Dave and his companions Bob and
John were National Security Agency analysts. They were weathermen of
the world's geopolitical climate, rather than the natural. Their
meteorologist roles were rather weak covers for their spending long
hours in a compartment crammed with telescopes and radio equipment.

Their cover story had never been very solid. The phony weathermen knew
that the rest of the crew knew their real purpose aboard Skycan, and
the crew knew that they knew that as well. No one made an issue of it,
though, or at least as long as little favors were extended by the NSA


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spooks. Sometimes it was getting them to transmit, via their private
communications downlink, birthday and Christmas greetings to friends
and relatives on Earth, or allowing a homesick space hardhat a few
minutes at one of the few optical telescopes aboard, and the only one
kept fixed on the planet. For the NSA weathermen the little favors
could be written off as good public relations and a guarantee that no
wise-aleck beamjack would stop by their table at mess and loudly
inquire about how every little thing was m Havana today. The hatch
opened from the inside, held open by Dave, his feet held to the carpet
by his Velcro-soled sneakers. He stepped aside as Hooker gently pushed
himself into the weather station. The other two guys--John and Bob, or
whatever their names were that week--were seated before consoles,
ostensibly studying photos of a storm front gathering over the West
Indies; there were no photos or computer printouts anywhere in sight.

The three of them looked almost like brothers who had all gone to Yale,
down to their clean-shaven faces, closely cropped hair, and neatly
pressed uniform coveralls, which almost no one else bothered to wear or
had modified by cutting off the sleeves or sewing on various unofficial
patches. The weathermen were so clean-cut, in fact, that whenever