Buck Rogers 01 Buck Rogers in Addison E Steele (v1.0) (epub)

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.BUCK ROGERSIN THE 25th CENTURYBuck Rogers - 01Addison E.Steele(An Undead Scan v1.0)PROLOGUE: 1987The spaceship, standing tall and proud in the early morning sunlight at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was the most advanced production of Free World technology.Its lines were clean.Its command module was functional, efficient, manufactured to the micromillimeter by the most brilliant engineers, the most expensive machinery, and with the most sophisticated techniques that mankind had ever conceived.Its engines were a dream, designed for maximum power efficiency, control, economy, smoothness of operation, and versatility of performance.The engineers had said it was impossible to design engines that would meet all those criteria.The comptrollers had said it was far too expensive.The politicians had said, “Our priorities are all wrong! We need to rebuild the cities, feed starving nations, clean up the air and the oceans, the rivers and the land.”The politicians were then invited to attend secret high-level briefings.Limousines that burned black gold at the rate of five miles to the gallon, black gold that cost almost four dollars a gallon in 1987, carried them through back streets past hushed onlookers on Pennsylvania Avenue, to the White House.A presidential aide greeted them under the front portico and guided them to an executive conference room.The presidential aide disappeared shortly after the politicians arrived.He returned, now, carrying briefing materials that he distributed to the senators.Each senator received a packet.Each packet had a warning notice rubber-stamped on its cover in glaring incandescent red:These materials are classified maximum security.They may not be taken with you.The information they contain may not be quoted, cited, or referred to by you in public or in private, in any medium or manner, directly or indirectly, under maximum legal penalty.The senators were given a few minutes to familiarize themselves with the contents of the briefing packets.No discussion was permitted.The presidential aide disappeared still again and then returned in advance of the President himself.The President was neatly dressed, freshly shaved, smiling, optimistic.He was a convincing actor—but senators are good actors, too.They saw through his bright exterior.The President made an opening statement.The senators responded with questions.What they had learned at State, at the Pentagon, at Intelligence, here at the White House—all pointed in one direction.The President did not need to plead, did not need to exert any of the famous charm—or the infamous pressure-tactics—that had brought him to his elevated position.The President told the senators the bald truth, and they went back to the Senate and voted money.NASA and all of NASA’s contractors then worked feverishly for months, around the clock.And now the spaceship stood glittering in the morning sunlight.Inland, rows of palmettos and calamander trees hissed softly in a light zephyr.Out to sea, over the Atlantic, gulls swooped and hovered in the clear, salt-tanged air.There were no fishing boats, no rich men’s yachts, no sight-seeing craft in the takeoff lane.Reaction materials, engine exhausts, staging particles might drop there.Anyone caught beneath a rocket as it thundered into the sky was in dire peril of catching a thousand-ton cylinder of metals and plastics and more exotic materials in his startled little lap.Inside the spaceship, one man worked alone through the checklist of switches and controls, safety measures, computer programs, instrument readouts, telemetering connections, knobs, dials, indicators.His earphones brought him a constant stream of instructions and questions and comments from Mission Control.Into a tiny microphone he almost whispered the readings and responses that Mission Control expected.Hundreds of tiny probes picked up his skin temperature, blood pressure, respiration rate, eyeball motion, heart action, muscle tension, nerve conditions, even his brain waves.Inside the Mission Control tower these and scores more were displayed on video tubes that glowed with an eerie light while automatic pens traced out a permanent record of the astronaut’s condition on long sheets of paper that rolled slowly past their tips—lines in red, green, blue, black, purple, crossing and re-crossing each other as they danced and jiggled across the endlessly unrolling plain of pale turquoise squares.High over the Atlantic a complex game of hide-and-seek was taking place.American space satellites were linked into the spaceship-Mission Control net, ready to relay telemetered information, take observations, provide data.Simultaneously, foreign hunter-killer satellites sought out the American instrumentation and communication satellites, invisible laser beams flashing when one came into range; a destroyed satellite would not plummet, meteorlike, to Earth.It would remain in orbit, calmly circling the Earth for years or even centuries until its path slowly decayed and it burned up in the thicker air closer to the surface.But meanwhile, it would be dead.At the same time, foreign spy-satellites tried electronically to tap into the communication between the astronaut in his ship and the hundreds of engineers and flight controllers who sat at their consoles reading their instruments and dials, switching their toggles and knobs, checking off their logbooks… and listening to the near-whispered words of the pilot in the spaceship, whispering back answers to his questions, checking and double- and triple-checking every variable in the procedure.There was one funny thing about it all.The astronaut—blue-eyed, short-haired, muscled with the lithe strength of a trained gymnast rather than the bulging brute power of a weight-lifter—sometimes hummed a little tune under his breath.It was an old tune.It was the tune of a song written before the astronaut’s father was ever born, written when his grandfather was a little boy.It was a funny, infectious tune, and it had words to it that occasionally broke through the humming, to the startlement of NASA flight controllers and, we can be certain, to the absolute bafflement of anybody sitting on another continent, sifting through the static and electronic background noise of a spy satellite orbiting over Cape Canaveral, Florida and eavesdropping on the exchanges between the astronaut and his flight controllers [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Pokrewne