"Jack Yeovil - Comeback Tour" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yeovil Jack)

of the data. He understood the gleam in the scientists' eyes as they pored over the rock samples or the
graph curves.

The Dream wasn't about money. It wasn't just about data, either, but that was part of it. The Dream was
about Victory. This wasAmerica 's purest conquest, the fulfilment of a national destiny. The wars were
still being fought, the war for the ownership of the sky." Fonvielle still believed what he had heard all
through his training. The sky belonged to the men who could take it, to the men with the Right Stuff. The
Dream was about sticking your hand into the sky and making a fist, holding it fast.

"Edwards has been monitoring steadily since last night," said Wardle. "I'm closing our contact."

Fonvielle had done his year in Tranquillity back in the '60s, when Richard Nixon was president and the
Needlepoint System was still in the planning stages. He rememberedCampGlenn as a peaceful place; his
off-duty time spent suited up outside the dome, his intercom down, the silence and stillness stretching out
forever, had been the most intense experiences of his life. None of his marriages had offered any hours to
compare with those. He had been withdrawn from the spaceside of the programme after a psychiatric
evaluation diagnosed him as prone to what they were calling Raptures of the Stars, that curious
detachment that affected long-term astronauts. A lot of space jocks got religion when they flopped down
to Earth, or cracked up. Fonvielle had just hiked himself up the chain of command. If he couldn't have the
sky himself, he would make sure that his country kept its grip on it.

"Excuse me, sir."

An orange-suited technician slipped between him and the Tranquillity Monitor, and broke the contacts.
The screen winked out. Glenn was still transmitting, but its signal was being fed into a computer bank at
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Edwards now. The administration trusted the machines to alert them if the automatic sensors came up
with anything interesting.

The Needlepoint System. That was where the programme had sailed into choppy waters. It had been
President Nixon's legacy. Trickydick had done so well with his 1960 inaugural promise to put an
American on the moon by 1965, with Glenn and Schirra touching down a full nine months ahead of
schedule, that he had resolved publicly to do something about the balance of power, and sworn to ring
the Earth with a series of weapons satellites capable of knocking out a flight of Soviet bombers
scrambling in Tashkent, or, indeed, a cockroach scuttling across a loft floor in Harlem.

A woman came into the control room with an armful of semi-opaque polythene sheets, and doled them
out. They fitted over the equipment like loose condoms, and gave the consoles, monitors, terminals and
databanks a ghostlike feel. Now the dust could settle in peace.

Fonvielle had been second-in-command of the Needlepoint Project when Nixon gracefully bowed out in
'68, passing on the presidential seal to Barry Goldwater. Then, NASA had really screwed the pooch.
During the years of struggle and failure, as system after system crashed, he had fought long and hard with
his subordinates at suppressing the nickname everyone in NASA was using for the programme. The
Needledick System.