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

--President Ronald Reagan State of the Union address January 25, 1984

''. . . In recent years there has been an increasing amount of
interest and speculation in the area of space colonization and space
habitation.... It is only fair to point out, however, that far too much
space colonization work has been pure utopian dreaming; historically,
there is nothing wrong with this if you keep fact and fiction
delineated. Similar utopian dreaming heralded the opening of the new
frontiers of the past. Cathay was once a magical kingdom with great
wizards and magic that were really advanced technology beyond the
comprehension of visitors. Far Araby was a place of jinns, flying
carpets and odalisques ready to do your every bidding.

America was a land of milk and honey where the streets were paved with
gold and even if they tossed you in jail it was in golden chains.

California was a land of perpetual sunshine where it never rained. And
the space colony offers us a pastoral existence with trees, grass,
grazing livestock, happy farmers and dancing children eating goat
cheese.... But opening a frontier is a deadly, difficult gut-tearing
job that requires the best people that the human race can produce and
demands its toll in lives and property."' --G. Harry Stine The Space
Enterprise

''Sure, we had trouble building Space Station One--but the trouble was
people."

--Robert A. Heinlein "Delilah and the Space Rigger"

PART ONE A Hard Day in the Clarke Orbit Some day soon--perhaps
tomorrow, perhaps a week or a month, maybe as long as a year from now
if they're really lazy about it--they're going to find this crevasse.

It won't be very difficult, because the tire tracks from my tractor
will remain indelibly printed in the gray lunar soil. There are no
winds on the Moon to shift dust over the tracks, no erosion save for
the impact of stray micrometeorites. My trail will remain fresh even
if they delay the search for a decade, and it will lead across the
Descartes Highlands east of the Abulfeda Crater until it ends, quite
abruptly, at the lip of this crevasse within sight of Argelander
Peak.



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When they shine a spotlight down here, they'll discover the wreckage of
my tractor, looking like one of the junked cars one sees from the