"ae2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Allen)

spacewalk," he continued, trying to sound breezy as he
quickly stretched the cable back to the panel and used the
screwdriver to carefully reattach its bare end to the junction
pole. "Moon sort of looks like ... y'know ... the way I saw it
from the Beach House the other night."
just a lot closer, right?
"Right." With the conduit now firmly back in place, he
closed the panel and slipped the screwdriver back in his belt.






ALLEN STEELE

"Okay, I'm coming back in now. Hope you Ive got that hot
chocolate ready for me."
What, is it cold out there on the beach?
Parnell pushed himself toward the open airlock hatch. "You
could say that, yeah."

As he expected, there was nothing wrong with the LRR
module.
Lewitt taped it down to the old map table on B-deck, opened
its case, and hooked it up to a computer diagnostics kit. Most
of the crew members and passengers hovered or sat around
and watched as he and Parnell pushed and prodded at it with
electrodes and tweezers while consulting a loose-leaf service
manual. Bromleigh caught the whole thing on videotape, of
course; Rhodes said it looked like a scene from some old B
movie Roger Corman once did, and when Dooley asked her if
it was the same one where the spaceship computer goes in-
sane and starts killing the crew, everyone laughed except for
the Germans, who apparently weren't into film trivia.
The unit came up aces, which was just as well, since there
were no spares aboard. In the old days there might have been
one, but these weren't the old days. So the next, obvious step
was to put the module back in place and see what happened.
Gene didn't tell anyone about the loose electrical cable. He
tried to convince himself that he was keeping his mouth shut
because he didn't want Rhodes and Bromleigh to get wind of
what he'd found, that he didn't want NASA to suffer embar-
rassment for avoidable hardware failure during the last Ameri-
can mission to the Moon. But the truth of the matter was, he
harbored suspicions that he didn't want to admit to himself,
let alone to anyone else.
So he sipped at his hot chocolate and waited for the next
shoe to drop.
He had gone EVA twice already that day, counting the