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

hours, bugging everyone about little details--a joint in one section
that needed to be rewelded, a bend in a truss which meant the beam had
to be replaced, all the stuff the computers had picked up since the
last shift--and being rewarded with surly grunts and mum bled
apologies. And the rest of the handful of space grunts who called
themselves beamjacks--because it sounded like ''lumber jack"--who for
some reason were thought of as pioneers instead of everyday Joes trying
to make it through another dogass day.

One by one, they managed to make it out of the whiteroom, through the
hatch at the end of the compartment into the next inflated plastic
cylinder, moving in a ragged single file toward the airlock. Now and
then someone had to go back because a suit sensor detected a slow leak
or a weak battery. The airlock was a big metal chamber which they were
herded into by another technician. When he sealed the hatch they stood
for another few minutes, their feet gripped to the floor by magnetic
overshoes, everything colored candy-apple red by the fluorescents in
the ceiling. No sound now, except the whisper of air inside one's
helmet and conversations overlapping in the comlink, received through
their snoopy helmets' earphones.

The opposite hatch of the airlock slid open, and Vulcan Station's main
construction bay lay before them like an airless basketball court,
paper-thin aluminum walls offering scant protection from the void.

They shuffled out onto the deck, some heading for the beam-builders,
some for the construction pods docked nearby, some for the hatch
leading outside the shack.

Those who went outside, one by one, gripped their MMUs' hand controls,
pushing them forward and letting the little jets push them away from
Vulcan. Once this had been exciting; now it was just the first part of
the job, getting out to the powersat. It lay before them like a vast
metal grid, a flat rectangle bigger than the towns some of them had

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been born in, larger than anything that had ever been built on Earth.

They floated away from Vulcan, little white stick-men against the
overwhelming darkness, the shack's blue and red lights outlining them
as silhouettes. Earth was a blue, white, and green crescent beyond the
powersat. They tried not to look at it, because it never did any good;
if you thought about it too much, you got depressed, like Popeye. Just
do your job; punch the clock and hope you make it through the shift
alive.

Once or twice a week, when he had a few minutes to spare at the end of
his lunch break, the beamjack the others called Popeye would float down