Time's Eye by Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online Page A

windows, photographed the station manually, as a backup to the automated pods mounted on the
Soyuz
’s exterior. It was an awkward job as each of them wore heavy spacesuit gloves.
    Each thruster maneuver took the
Soyuz
a little further from the Station. At last the line-of-sight radio contact began to break down, and as a farewell the Station crew played them some music. As the Strauss waltz swirled tinnily under the hiss and pop of static, Kolya indulged in a little more nostalgic sadness. Kolya had grown to love the Station. He had learned to sense the great ark’s subtle rotations, and the vibrations when its big solar arrays realigned, and the rattles and bangs of the complicated ventilation system. After so long aboard, he had more deeply embedded feelings about the Station than any home he’d lived in. After all, what other home actually keeps you alive, minute by minute?
    The music cut off.
    Musa was frowning. “Stereo one, I am Stereo one. Ground, I am Stereo one. Come in, I am Stereo one . . .”
    Sable said, “Hey, Kol. Can you see Station? It should have come back into view on my side by now.”
    “No,” said Kolya, looking through his window. There was no sign of the Station.
    “Maybe it went into shadow,” Sable said.
    “I don’t think so.” The
Soyuz
had actually been leading the Station into Earth’s shadow. “And anyhow, we would see its lights.” He felt oddly uneasy.
    Musa snapped, “Will you two be quiet? We lost the uplink from the ground.” He pressed the control pads before him. “I’ve run diagnostic checks, and have tried the backups. Stereo One, Stereo One . . .”
    Sable closed her eyes. “Tell me you potato farmers haven’t fouled up again.”
    “Shut up,” Musa said menacingly. And he continued to call, over and over, while Sable and Kolya listened in silence.
    The ship’s slow rotation was now giving Kolya a direct view of Earth’s immense face. They were flying over India, he saw, and toward a sunset; the shadows from the creases of mountain ranges to the north of the subcontinent were long. But there seemed to be changes on the surface of Earth, dapples, like the play of sunlight on the floor of a turbulent lake.

6: ENCOUNTER
    Josh and Ruddy reached the downed machine with the first group of soldiers. The privates had rifles, and they warily circled the machine, mouths open, eyes wide. None of the party had seen anything like it before.
    Inside a big blown-glass cabin there were three people: two men in seats in the front, and a woman in the back. They watched, hands held high, as the armed soldiers circled them. They cautiously removed their bright blue helmets. The woman and one of the men appeared to be Indian, and the other man was white. Josh could see how the latter grimaced in pain.
    Considering how hard it had landed—and that it was light enough to have flown in the air in the first place—the machine seemed remarkably intact. The big glass shell that dominated the front end was pocked here and there but was unbroken, and the blades were still attached to a rotary hub, not folded or snapped off. But the tail section, an affair of open pipe work and tubing, had been reduced to a stump. There was a hissing noise, as if some gasket had broken, and a pungent oil leaked onto the stony ground. It was evident that this mechanical bird would fly no more.
    Josh hissed to Ruddy, “I don’t recognize those blue helmets. What army is this? Russian?”
    “Perhaps. But see that the injured one has a Stars and Stripes stenciled on his helmet!”
    Suddenly a trigger was cocked.
    “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot . . .” It was the woman. She leaned forward from her perch in the back of the sphere to try to shield the wounded pilot.
    A soldier—Josh recognized him as Batson, a Newcastle lad, one of the more levelheaded of the privates—was pointing his rifle at the woman’s head. He called, “You speak English?”
    “I am English.”
    Batson’s eyebrows raised. But he