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

"Your signature, sir. By the X."

She handed him a pen, and he scrawled.

"Thank you, sir."

The lights on the big board went out one by one.

Fonvielle remembered the American dead. The. programmes had all been costly. Mercury, Gemini,
Apollo, Hercules, Pegasus, Circe,Argos , Vulcan. But there had always been men and, for the last seven
years, women. Everyone wanted to cross the threshold, and reach into space. He had lost friends to the
stars. More than he should have. Alan Shepard, Grissom, Cap Collins, Capaldi, Len Nimoy, Rusoff,
Mikko Griffith, Mildred Kuhn, Mihailoff, Hamill, Con Lindsay, Garret Breedlove. The white heat of the
early '60s, with Nixon riding them for results, had been exhilarating at the time, but the historians were
right. Corners had been cut, and the drive to get Apollo together had killed too many people. He
remembered the blown hatch that had taken Grissom, lightheaded from the first spacewalk, to the bottom
of the ocean. And the computer error that had turned Richard Rusoff into a second moon, silently
orbiting the Earth for a projected five centuries before the burn-up cremated his dried and preserved
body. And the fuel leak which had burned up Griffith, Kuhn and Mihailoff in an instant just before
take-off.

But it had taken the Needlepoint failures to bring down the programme.

Needlepoint was up there somewhere, glinting in the night sky. A ring of satellites, fully equipped with
laser weapons, hanging useless in their erratic orbits. It would be at least thirty years before they started
tumbling towards the ionosphere or out into space. Every time an American strategist looked up at the
stars on a clear night, he would be reminded of the money pit the Needlepoint System had turned out to
be. And he would curse the memory of President Trickydick Nixon. And of Commander Lawrence
Jerome Fonvielle.

They left him alone, and turned off the main lights. He stood in the dark, surrounded by dead machines.

At last, he could give in. Tears coursed down his cheeks, and his entire body was racked with silent
sobs.

He slumped onto a polythene-covered swivel chair, and wiped his leaking eyes.
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The skeleton programme NASA was keeping up at Edwards Air Force Base was a joke. Just a few
green airmen peering at the monitors to make sure all the government-owned satellites were still spinning
in their orbits, keeping out of the way of all the private junk. Agnew had given up the country's hold on
the sky, and left only a few multinats in the space market. And all they were interested in was throwing up
a horde of little silver balls so they could beam porno into the depths of the Amazon basin, or shift
electronic blips of money fromSwitzerland toOsaka . The age of the explorers, the pioneers and the
heroes was over. The Suits had thrown it away, and now the merchants were moving in.