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

First, you have to understand that outer space isn't all that it's cut
out to be....

1

Homesick

The days began the same way after a while: adventure made mediocre
through repetition, the vastness of space a stale background against
which their tedious lives were played.

A dozen men floated in the narrow cylindrical compartment all facing in
the same direction like automatons waiting to be activated. Even in
weightlessness their aluminum space armor and enormous MMU backpacks
seemed to hang on them like heavy burdens; they slouched under their
packs, their shoulders bent, their helmeted heads hanging low, their
hands moving slowly as they replenished their oxygen tanks from hoses
dangling from the wall.

The compartment was filled with the sound of hissing air and the thin
crackle of suit radios being tested, of muttered comments and
complaints and the clink of tools nestling together in the cargo
pockets of their overgarments. Behind them a technician, wearing a
T-shirt with a rock band's name stenciled on the front, floated from
man to man, checking suit joint seals, turning intake valves they
couldn't reach, rescuing runaway gloves and power tools from midair.

There were no windows. CRT screens overhead displayed job assignments
for the day, and TV monitors showed scenes inside the construction
shack's main bay and outside, where the work was going on. No one paid
attention to the monitors; everyone knew what it looked like out there
and didn't want to be reminded.

They were all in there on that shift. Virgin Bruce, singing an old
Grateful Dead song, his raucous laughter ringing through the
whiteroom.

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Mike Webb, smiling at Bruce's jokes, trying for the umpteenth time to
get the suiting procedure right, always having to get Julian, the
technician, to help him. Al Hernandez, moving efficiently, telling
another interminable story about his family in Miami, his brother in
the FBI, his son who wanted to join the Marines, his wife who kept
asking when he was coming home ├╣ (everyone, hearing these things,
nodding, silently asking, what's new, Al?). Hank Luton, who would be
in the command center and not have to wear a suit for the next four