Arthur C Clarke & Stephen Baxter [Time Odyssey 01] Time's Eye (v4.0) (pdf)

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there was only the short journey home, a mere four hundred kilo-
meters down through the air to the surface of the Earth, where he
would be reunited with his young family.
Kolya s full name was Anatole Konstantinovich Krivalapov. He
was forty-one years old, and this tour of duty on the International
Space Station had been his fourth.
Kolya, Musa and Sable, the crew of the ferry, clambered down
through the living compartment of the Soyuz, making for the
descent module. They were clumsy in their thick orange spacesuits,
their pockets crammed with the souvenirs they intended to keep
from the ground crews. The living compartment was to be jetti-
soned during reentry and would burn up in Earth s atmosphere,
and so was full of junk to be removed from the ISS. This included
such items as medical waste and worn-out underwear. Sable Jones,
the one American in the crew of three, led the way, and complained
loudly in her coarse southern-USA English. Jeez, what s in here,
Cossack jockstraps?
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3 6 " C L A R K E & B A X T E R
Musa, the Soyuz commander, gave Kolya a silent look.
The descent compartment was a cramped little hut, filled by
their three couches. Sable had been trained up on the ship s systems,
but she was the nearest thing to a passenger on this hop back to
Earth. So she was first into the cabin, where she scrambled into the
right-hand couch. Kolya followed, clambering down into the left-
hand couch. During this descent he would serve as the spacecraft s
engineer, hence his allocation of seat. The compartment was so
small that even as he headed for the furthest point of the cabin he
brushed past Sable s legs, and she glared at him.
And now Musa came plummeting down, a bright orange mis-
sile, helmet in hand. He was a bulky man anyhow, made more so by
the layers of his suit. The couches were so crammed together that
when the three of them were at rest their lower legs would be
pressed against one another s, and as Musa awkwardly tried to
strap himself in, he shoved Kolya and Sable this way and that.
Sable s reactions were predictable. Where did they make this
thing, a tractor factory? . . .
It was a moment Musa had been waiting for. Sable, I have lis-
tened to your mouth flapping for the last three months, and as you
were commander there I could do nothing about it. But on this
Soyuz, I, Musa Khiromanovich Ivanov, am commander. And until
the hatch breaks open and we are hauled out by the ground crew,
you, madam, will what is the English phrase? Shut the fuck up.
Sable s face was like stone. Musa was a tough veteran of fifty
who had served as Station commander himself, and had even been
to the Moon, though not to command the multinational base there.
They all knew that his admonishment of Sable would have been
listened to by their comrades on the Station and, crucially, by the
ground controllers.
Sable said through gritted teeth, You ll pay for that, Musa.
Musa just grinned and turned away.
The descent compartment was cluttered. It contained the
spacecraft s main controls, as well as all the equipment that would
be needed during the return to Earth: parachutes, flotation bags,
survival gear, emergency rations. Its walls were lined with elasti-
cized tags and Velcro patches, and were covered by material to be
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T I M E S E Y E " 3 7
returned from the Station, including blood and stool samples from
the biomed program, and cuttings Kolya himself had made from
the pea plants and fruit trees he had been attempting to grow. All
this stuff crowded in from the hull, reducing the space available for
human beings even further.
But amid the clutter there was a window, to Kolya s left-hand
side. Through it he glimpsed the blackness of space, a slice of sky-
bright Earth, and the struts and micrometeorite-dinged walls of the
Station itself, shining brightly in the raw sunlight. The Soyuz, still
docked to the Station, was carried by the bigger craft s ponderous
rotation, and shadows slid across Kolya s view.
Musa worked them through the preseparation checklist, talk-
ing to the ground and to the crew in the Station. Kolya had little to
do: his most important item was a pressure test of his spacesuit.
This was a Russian ship, and unlike the pilot-oriented American
engineering tradition, most of the systems were automated. Sable
continued to grumble as she reached for various controls, which
were situated around the capsule at all positions and angles. Some
of them were so awkward to reach, veteran cosmonauts learned, it
was better to poke at them with a wooden stick. But Kolya took a
perverse pride in the ship s low-tech, utilitarian design.
The Soyuz was like a green pepperpot, with lacy solar-cell
wings stuck on the side of its cylindrical body. Seen from the win-
dows of the Space Station the Soyuz, bathed in the brilliant sunlight
of space, had looked like an ungainly insect: compared to the new
American spaceplanes it was a clumsy old bird indeed. But the
Soyuz was a venerable craft. It had been born in the Cold War age
of Apollo, and had actually been intended to make journeys to the
Moon. Remarkably, Soyuz craft had been flying twice as long as
Kolya himself had been alive. Now, of course, in 2037, people had
returned to the Moon Russians among them this time! But there
was no room on such exotic journeys for the Soyuz; for these faith-
ful workhorses there was only the plod to and from the battered
ISS, whose few scientific purposes had long been superseded by the
lunar projects, and whose glamor had been stolen by the Mars
missions and yet which remained in orbit, kept aloft by political
inertia and pride.
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The moment came for the Soyuz at last to undock from the
Station. Kolya heard a few subtle bumps and bangs, and the faintest
of nudges, and a small sadness burst in his heart. But as an inde-
pendent spacecraft the Soyuz s call sign that day was Stereo, and
Kolya was comforted by Musa s patient calls to the ground: Stereo
One, this is Stereo One . . .
There were still three hours to go before the descent was sched-
uled to begin, and the crew were now set to inspect the exterior of
the Station. Musa activated a program in the ship s computer, and
the Soyuz, firing its thrusters, began a series of straight-line jaunts [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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