The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself (Apollo Quartet) Read Online Free Page B

you ninety trillion miles in a couple of weeks.
    Where’s the Serpo engine? Elliott asks.
    Other side of the rock, with the nuclear reactor.
    Weber returns her attention to the FDAI and altimeter on the control panel.
    They are both in spacesuits, helmets and gloves on. It is procedure when flying a LM Taxi. Elliott spent seventy days in his Mars Module, an uprated LM, and pretty much all of that in his A7LB, so none of this is unfamiliar. True, he had the MM to himself, but here his left arm is inches from Weber’s right and he has barely enough room to stretch.
    You’ve flown on her, Elliott asks Weber, to Earth Two?
    She shakes her head. No, I’m NASA. It’s you guys who fly the Rocks.
    Us? Elliott doesn’t follow.
    USAF. We’re strictly passengers, and I’ve never been assigned to Phaeton Base.
    The LM Taxi drops toward the asteroid, then an abrupt shift in his frame of reference hits Elliott and he now sees himself approaching a grey and powdery vertical cliff. The LM Taxi shoots “upward” and he notices Weber is peering up through the docking windows in the roof. Ahead, or above, it no longer matters which, he can see the Goddard’s hab modules, like some strange minimalist chemical plant. This is all automatic, computerised, though Weber has still moved the COAS to its mount on the docking window frame and set the panel switch from off to ovhd. She keeps her hands on the thrust/translation controller and attitude controller as the docking adaptor drifts nearer. The two tee-crosses, one on the LM Taxi, one on the docking adaptor, gradually line up as the LGC fires tiny corrective bursts from the RCS until, with a thunk, the probe on the Goddard’s hatch thumps into the LM Taxi’s drogue, and the capture latches engage with a confident crunch.
    Once Weber has confirmed the docking tunnel is pressurised, she unfastens her waist restraints and kicks herself upward to the hatch. Moments later, she swings it wide, revealing a man in a blue CWG framed in the hatchway.
    Welcome aboard, sir, the man says. With one hand to the coaming to hold him steady, he salutes.
    Major William Finley? asks Elliott
    It cannot be anyone else. The golden oak leaf on his collar gives the man’s rank and Finley, the commanding officer, is the only major on the Robert H Goddard. Finley also has a Space Command shield on one shoulder.
    Sir, acknowledges Finley. He pushes himself back, and gestures for Elliott to join him.
    I have to head straight back, Weber says. She gives a tight smile. Good luck, she adds; and then pulls herself down to the commander’s position and sets about refastening her waist restraints.
    Elliott unlocks and then lifts off his helmet. He breathes in through his nose, but the LM Taxi’s cabin is odourless. After removing his gloves and dumping them in the upturned bowl of his helmet, he disconnects his spacesuit from the spacecraft’s environmental system, and unclips his waist restraints.
    Weber ignores him, and stands, a hand to each controller, her expression set, gazing out of the commander’s window. It’s obvious there’s no love lost between the civilian crew of Space Station Freedom and the military crew of the Goddard, and he wonders that such rivalries should exist out here, hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth. He gives a shrug, grabs his kitbag with his free hand and then jumps up towards the docking hatch.
    “Up” suddenly becomes “along” and now he’s flying toward a hatch on the wall ahead of him. He chucks his kitbag through, grabs the coaming and pulls himself into the docking adaptor. It’s a small cubical chamber, and Finley has already moved through another hatch and into what appears to be a much larger space, and is waiting for Elliott to join him.
    He does, and once again Elliott’s perception shifts: he’s now at the top of a wide and deep cylinder with a metal floor composed of triangular gridwork some ten feet below him. Visible through that are another two such